Halloween decorating

On on the board of my building. One of the tasks I do each year is decorate the lobby for Halloween. Before I took over the job the decorations were al store bought. The decorating itself was a nice communal activity but I didn’t love the idea od spending money on store bought decorations.

Each year, with the help of the kids in the building I come up with a theme. The goal is to create something that is easy enough for kids to do, costs nearly nothing and looks appropriate for the season.

This year I also looked up ideas on Pinterest. I had found a tutorial on making spider webs out of garbage bags. I ad also seen something about creating flocks of bats.

I asked neighbors to donate the needed supplies. Parents and kids came at the appointed time and got to work.

Usually early in the process it feels like this year it just isn’t going to work and I try to figure out an alternative plan for decorating the lobby.

About half way through it is a chaotic scene. The lobby is a mess. Kids are doing things that maybe they ought not to be doing. I try to keep everyone busy and create jobs for kids as young as three and as old as eleven. I get kids to teach one another how to cut bats or make the spider webs or stick the bats up on the mirrors.

Eventually though, the lobby looks great.

I love the bats in the light fixtures.

Some of the kids decided to make ghosts for the elevators out of white garbage bags.

Some of the kids worked on the front entry.

At one point a group of the youngest kids had dressed themselves as ghosts with the tattered white garbage bags.

It was a successful day.

Comments

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

Search This Blog