Cuckoo for Passover!

Oy, vey. What a day!

I have been cleaning house for days. I vacuumed out the couches, under all the furniture (with help from Miss I) and spent all day today cleaning the kitchen and moving the regular food and dishes out of the cupboards, and replacing it with the special Passover food and dishes (paper and plastic). The *worst* part of Passover, IMO, is doing dishes by hand. So I avoid it for the most part by using disposable stuff. It is only one week, I figure, and if it helps me to hang on to my sanity, it is probably cost-effective. ;-) I have to use pots and pans for cooking, and coffee mugs for my hot beverages, but other than that it is toss and walk.

Tonight is the night for Search For Chametz, which is the Jewish equivalent of the Easter Egg Hunt. We take a bread item and divide it into 10 pieces. I put them into ziplock baggies so that my clean house doesn't get bread crumbs put back into it. Then I hide the baggies and let the kids go find them after dark. It is traditional to use a candle for this, but I think flashlights will do because of the kids' ages. Then tomorrow morning is the Burning of Chametz, which the boys look forward to every year. It is fun for them because I actually fire up the large fire pit in the back yard. I get scared doing this and crouch back while I hold a loooong match and turn on the gas. I have never been injured doing this. Yet. Then the smell of burning bread fills the neighborhood and pieces of flaming paper bag take flight in an attempt to cause pyrotechnic mayhem. The boys are enthralled.

The really odd part of Passover this year is deciding what bread item to use on Friday night for Shabbat to say the blessing over. All year we use a traditional Jewish bread called Challah. The problem this year is that Passover starts Saturday night. If we burn the bread (chametz) Friday morning, thereby declaring bread and bread items null and void for us for the rest of the week, and we are not supposed to eat Matzah until the first Passover meal (seder) on Saturday night, what should we use to say the blessing? I called my MIL and she suggested using egg Matzah. She confirmed it with BIL, who is an orthodox rabbi, so I got a box of egg matzah and I'm going with that. Done.



By mid week I usually start to chafe because of cravings for my normal food. Observant Jews eat Matzah (flat cracker-bread), meat, chicken, milk, yogurt, cheese, fruits and vegetables and some grainy cake-type items cooked with ground matzah as flour. And there are passover candies/chocolate (thank G-d). But the week gets pretty long and it is nice to get back to eating normal breakfast cereals and pizza and sandwiches again. The cool thing is how much pride I take at the end for exercising what I feel is a HUGE amount of self control to make it through the week eating only Passover food. And that gets us to the moral of the story.

There is a school of thought that believes that many of the Jewish rituals are aimed at teaching people self control. For example, when we say the blessings before Friday night (Shabbat) dinner, the kids are expected to sit there, hungry, with a full cup of grape juice in front of them. They cannot drink it until the blessings have been recited. Kids who are raised to have self control are more likely to exercise it when older, and not do bad things with the neighbor's wife, etc.

So here I will sit, eating a bland diet and trying not to covet anything of my neighbor's. I can do it. I can do it. I can do it.