Seders

In celebrating the Jewish holiday of Passover, it is traditional to celebrate two seders, celebrating the Exodus from Egypt. This year, we ended up celebrating three seders, with a variety of people and settings.

The first was a pre-Passover seder that we hosted for our neighbourhood potluck ("Hoodluck", for short) group the night before Passover started. Since I was the only Jewish adult present, I was the de facto seder leader, and did my best to blend traditional seder elements with traditions from my family.

Unfortunately, we didn't get many pictures of the event, but here is one of Sam, getting into the interactive, recreating-the-slavery-experience spirit of the seder by crushing matzah with one of his toys.


And here is our seder plate, with a supplemental bowl of parsely off to the side.


Hosting ten people for dinner created a number of dishes. Here is the before-and-after evidence of all the dish-doing that happened in the aftermath of the seder. You will, of course, notice that there are still some dishes in the "after" picture, but I will point out that the pile of dishes is, much, much smaller!


For our second seder, which was on the first night of Passover, we were invited to Dan and Sheila's house, along with several other families from our synagogue, and Dan and Sheila's kids and significant others. It was a great evening, and felt very warm, welcoming, and extended family-ish (in a good way! :) Unfortunately, we don't have any pictures, so you'll have to imagine everyone gathered around a very long table for lots of excellent, kosher-for-Passover food.

Finally, we went to a second seder (well, our third seder, but who's counting?) hosted by Temple Beth Ora. This ended up being a quite different crowd from the people that were at Dan and Sheila's the previous night, so it was good to see a wide variety of TBO people. Also, the Rabbi introduced some elements that -- even having just been to two seders -- we had not yet seen, so that was nice. Again, we didn't take too many pictures, and the only one that turned out was this one of Sam, who spent a large part of the seder set-up time gathering gummi worms and spiders (for the Ten Plagues) into neat piles on people's chairs. I made sure to move these "collections" before anyone sat down! :)



After the third seder, we were all officially seder-ed out... with the possible exception of Sam, who was crying for "More Seder!" as we left that evening.