We are just overflowing with sweetness over here. Today we celebrated Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, and ate many, many sweet things in hopes of a very sweet coming year. Also, they taste good. I made honey cake, and my mother-in-law’s awesome kugel, and challah. These are the same things we’ve made every year since we moved here five years ago, so I guess it’s officially a tradition. Poof—tradition! It’s fun to be a tradition maker and a tradition embracer. I was thinking a lot about this today as I kneaded and stirred. I think that one of the reasons that Jewish holidays are so much fun for me to celebrate is that I’m not trying to reach back and recreate a glorious childhood memory. I find myself doing this with the Christian holidays that I celebrated growing up—I want my daughter’s holiday experience to be as rich, and oddly, often to be just the same as mine was. I’m a lot more reasonable about the rest of her life being her own, so what is up with holidays? Maybe I’ll try to make a point to cut this out. It’s a lot of fun to celebrate a holiday without too may ideas about how it should be.
