Pesach so far

[liv]

This year. This year. I have lots of spare annual leave since I haven't been allowed to do anything except work so far this year. So I took a couple of days off before the festival, and I'm thinking of making that a habit because leisurely spring cleaning over two full days is much more pleasant than trying to do things in a rush in the evenings after work. And jack was incredibly helpful and we did a little bit of sorting and tidying as well as cleaning and it was really satisfying.

I did the actual Seder prep on Shabbat, which I know I shouldn't but I also had little hope of preparing the whole meal a day in advance. My OSOs were able to help with the cooking since we are bubbled now. So cjwatson came over in the morning and made his signature pavlova, which needs to be left in the oven for a chunk of time. And then ghoti_mhic_uait joined us in the afternoon with the younger three kids. The middles, 9 and 12, were incredibly helpful, they're both really confident cooks, and littlest aged 9 months was extremely extra cute. With such a great team I had everything comfortably ready in time.

Then my parents and my aunt and her recently widowed friend and my siblings and their partners joined us in their separate Zoom squares. I was drifting towards despair at a second online Pesach, but the thing is, we've all got good at Zoom by now. cjwatson helped me to acquire a decent conference mic, and rigged up a webcam separately from the laptop so that all seven of us at the big table were visible and audible in the video call. And we did a pretty good job of making sure everyone got a chance to speak even with the constraints of interruptions not going well with the technology. There were lots of excellent questions, especially from the kids, but also we kept the timing relatively brisk.

We mostly muted for the meal and chatted to the people in the same household. Tiniest guest applauded my soup <3 And I had been unsure whether we'd manage the after-meal service at all but in the event most of us did manage to reconvene. Judith found the afikoman and we had a somewhat chaotic exchange of presents. The children gave me a copy of the Switch game Super Smash Bros, since they would like me to practise it until I'm less terrible at it. ghoti_mhic_uait gave us bunny-themed board games in honour of the hare acronym for Saturday night seder. Hilariously cjwatson and I managed to exchange identical copies of A desolation called peace. And we managed some silly songs, including my actually musical partners leading Who knows one in Hebrew.

I did basically nothing on Sunday, which was blissful. I didn't get up in time for shul. I bimbled over to OSOs' in the afternoon and played video games and shared my sister's cakes which we had been too full for after the seder meal. I didn't go to the community Seder either. But yesterday I did attend the Seder hosted by my old community in Stoke. They had no input from me at all apart from reminding them to count the Omer. And again, they've got very competent at Zoom, and a lot of the leading was shared by my bar mitzvah student.

I've decided to have a try at #ColorTheOmer this year. I'm not usually a fan of this kind of spiritual practice but spending a little time each evening colouring and reflecting seems to be good for me so far.

Anyway, I'm feeling loved and relaxed and generally good about the festival, in spite of everything.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I'm glad Pesach was a good one for you this year!

[liv]

I meant to say that another thing we did on the chilled out first day of Pesach was watch a terrible cooking show that was doing a Passover special. I don't normally watch random Sunday morning TV but I really liked just how ordinarily bad this was. It wasn't some earnest thing about Learning About Other Cultures, it was just a bunch of random Jewish people messing about, talking about cooking, teasing each other, a little bit of explaining the festival somewhat incoherently, but mostly just forgettable daytime TV.

Rob Rinder I hadn't come across before and he's adorable. And I loved the archive footage of Nigel Slater being taught how to make chicken soup by a deeply irreverent 80-something, very London, Jewish woman.

I came across it in the first place because of a minor spat on FB, where someone commented, to a Jewish acquaintance's post: ugh, why does the BBC have to be so politically correct these days? And I was a bit sad about the notion of someone complaining to their Jewish friend that having Jewish people on TV is bad somehow. So I was pleased to see that it wasn't in fact some kind of, look at us we're so ~multicultural~ thing, just Jews just getting to be ordinary, appearing specifically as Jews but in a very banal, normal context.

[superborb]

I'm glad you had a pleasant Pesach!

Aww kids at the age of being helpful are the cutest!

[worlds_of_smoke]

It sounds like you had a lovely Pesach. ♥

[rosefox]

I'm so glad you were able to have a good holiday! Chag sameach!