My offline life has been pretty chaotic over the past couple of months, and so I took a break from my regular blog activities. (At the risk of tempting fate, the chaos seems to have subsided for now.) However, the unusual amount of time that I recently spent at my parents’ house gave me an idea for a Top Five post about past and present family traditions.
1. My parents used to host a massive potluck on New Year’s Day. The other kids and I usually spent the party building towers out of foam furniture in the downstairs playroom, watching movies in my parents’ bedroom (
Free Willy and
Hook were popular choices, since they could appeal to a fairly wide age range), or both.
2. My family and I have never been particularly religious, but my parents have also chosen to host a Passover Seder for as long as I can remember. Once they no longer had a dining room, we started setting up card tables end to end in the living room in order to sear as many as 30 people: my sisters (and, later, my brother-in-law) and me, our grandparents, my cousins and their parents, and, usually, at least a few family friends, some of whom have been part of our lives since before I was born. We’ve always begun the ceremony with a round-robin reading of the preface to
The Gates of the Forest, and Older Sister often ended it with the following quote from Rabbi Hillel:
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” I’ve usually been in charge of matzo ball soup.
3. Older Sister has always been the opposite of patriotic, but for many years, before the COVID lockdown, and a couple of times since it ended, she organized a “Fourth of JuPie” party and invited friends and relations to bring sweet and savory pies.
4. I am very lucky that my immediate family got to spend a few days at a beach, either on Cape Cod or on Montauk, every summer for most of my childhood. I’ve returned to the Cape – on my own, with friends, or with my sisters – a few times since becoming an adult.
5. The location and composition of our family Hanukkah gatherings has changed over the years, but making latkes – from the peeling of potatoes to the chopping of onions to the frying in oil – has always been a team effort.