One of these days I am going to get around to making a t-shirt that offers a solid explanation for the reason why Jews celebrate many of our holidays. Before I offer an explanation for the shirt let me preface it by saying that I am not the first M.O.T. to come up with this line.
In fact, I might not even be the first to come up with a T-shirt, but we’ll deal with that later. I want the shirt to read something like this:
Why Jews Celebrate Jewish Holidays“They Tried to Kill Us!They Lost!Let’s Celebrate!Let’s Eat!”
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Obviously it needs to be cleaned up a bit, but you get the general idea. More importantly we’re a few days out from one of my favorite holidays, Purim.
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Purim is a joyous celebration and a time in which the community really lets loose. If you spend any time tooling around the J-Blogosphere you’ll see a million posts about it. I think that I have four or five of my own that talk about the chag, which is also why I mulled over whether I had anything new or important to add to the discussion.
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Anyway one of the aspects of Purim that is fun are the costumes. It is not uncommon for some people to start thinking well in advance about what/who they want to dress up as, but I am not one of them.
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Don’t ask me why, but I tend not to dress up in costume. Blame it on too many years of dressing up like Goofy. But I do have fun helping the kids find an outfit. They love it and I get a lot of pleasure from watching them.
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One of their favorite parts of the holiday is the traditional Purim carnival. They love playing all the games, especially the one that offers goldfish as a prize. Every year I try to avoid the damn thing and every year I end up coming home with new fish. It is not that I am against having fish as pets, rather it is that the Purim carnival goldfish generally has a lifespan of three days.
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As a point of interest there is no uniform agreement on when to hold the Purim carnival. This means that some shuls will have it the week before the holiday and some will hold it the week after. In theory this shouldn’t be a big deal, but the past couple of years that kid I call “Little Jack” has always heard about a couple of them.
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So the end result is that he starts grinding me to take the family to many carnivals. Now I have never been afraid to say no to the kids, but it still doesn’t stop the multiple requests to “see what is different” at each carnival.
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And now if you’ll excuse me I am off to change the clocks and get some much needed shut-eye because the whole leap forward bit is similar to enforced jet lag.
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If you are interested in past posts about Purim check out the links below.
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