April 10, 2017

Dear Baby,

It’s Passover and here is something I have learned from my mom and mother in law. Turning over a kitchen and then cooking for a zillion people is not a fun activity. You do it, and I’m sure there is some kind of weird sick pleasure in it, but overall it makes people  feel overwhelmed and tired.

One of your Bubbies got literally sick and the other is still recovering from escapades in the kitchen. Worth it? I mean, people love brisket but I’m not so sure.

Passover to me seems like an expensive and burdensome venture. Like should you have to shell out tons of money and time and effort to recall the journey that our forefathers made out of Egypt? Pretty sure that being together with family, sharing an oral tradition and making memories would be the key ingredients to any holiday, not spending millions of dollars on food and then also throwing away tons of food because it isn’t “kosher.”

I can’t say for sure but I’ll bet our forefathers would fucking plutz if they knew that people were wasting money and food just to keep a K for P home. Like, what would even make a pickle kosher for passover. A pickle isn’t made with anything bread related. Then you end up with shitty pickles that you have to throw out and people that were once slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt (as the story goes) would fucking shit bricks to see a whole jar of pickles be wasted because they were shitty in the first place.

But, I like tradition. I like holidays, I like hosting and I like celebrating. We want to incorporate some of the pieces of our heritage into our home with you. We want you to grow up enjoying the passover meal. How to do this in a way that doesn’t feel counterintuitive? Not sure.

I guess as we all grow together as a family, we will make our own rules and traditions. I can tell you that I will never buy shitty pickles (sorry mom, they were really bad) or weird yogurt, that I am not having a whole separate set of dishes in my home (WHO EVEN HAS ROOM FOR THAT) but that we will most certainly have a lively seder meal and bad-ass Charoset.

And so continues the saga of how to have religion in your home and life when you don’t quite subscribe to it.

xo

Mom