While our people have been celebrating Passover for thousands of years, The Word Mavens have been celebrating it (collectively) for only about a century. Still, that’s a lot of matzah –and a lot of memories.
For many years, we hosted the whole mishpuchah. We’d rent banquet tables and chairs to seat 24 people in the living room. We’d make a kids’ table – with sticker books and crayons to keep the kids entertained. Zaydes – and more recently our husbands – would preside over the Seder, set the pace and call on guests to read each part.
These days, we’re the grownups at the seder and when we get ready for Passover we get sentimental. We are the keepers of the treasures handed down from our parents and grandparents: The ivory linen tablecloth that Joyce’s mother hand-embroidered with cross-stitched blue flowers when she was a young bride.
The little horseradish dish with the silver spoon from Ellen’s mom.
Joyce uses the seder plate that was a gift from cousins who celebrated with us every year until they moved to Boston. Her Elijah’s Cup is the sterling silver kiddush cup that her husband got at his Bar Mitzvah. And that small crystal dish that was a wedding present from we-don’t-remember-who, the one that’s been waiting all year to be invited to dinner? We fill it with salt water and pass it around as we dip the parsley.
We also pull out the cherished objects that that our kids made in preschool and Hebrew school some 30 years ago: The glitter painted matzah cover. The pillowcases decorated with drawings of kiddush cups and the order of the seder – so we can recline at the table.
The cute little afikomen bag decorated with green yarn.
Our usual Wednesday night dinner doesn’t include plagues, so it’s only once a year that we can bring out the paper frog puppet.
Many people keep a special set of dishes just for Passover to ensure that the dishes never touched chametz. If you keep kosher, that means you have two sets of Passover dishes, milchig and fleishig. Joyce doesn’t keep kosher, but she does use a special set of dishes at Passover: Grandmom Pearl’s gold-rimmed Rose Dawn china, a Japanese pattern popular in the 1950s. These dishes can’t go in the dishwasher. They have a fancy gold trimmed edge – but it’s worth it. Joyce enjoys the ritual of washing them by hand after the guests have left.
Passover also brings fond food memories – like the one of Poppy standing at the stove making pesachdik rolls, which were wonderful warm out of the oven but didn’t last longer than a day. When we pull out Nan’s 12-quart WearEver aluminum stockpot, we remember her delicious matzah ball soup.
Each year we google “Passover recipes” for new ideas, but we always come back to our favorites. The food-stained 3 x 5 index cards with recipes that have been passed down and around among families and friends.
Joyce loves her sister Jill’s Passover cookies, which are fun to make because you make a thumbprint in the center of the cookie and fill it with chocolate chips or preserves!
When Ellen’s former neighbor Hannah wrote down her recipe for fudgy Pesach brownies on a kitchen notepad, Ellen pasted it right into her recipe collection. The brownies turn out great every year! And every Pesach she thinks of Hannah she turns to her purple ink recipe!
Not all of our favorite recipes are on index cards. When Joyce’s Aunt Ruth was in her late 70s, she taught herself to use a computer and put all of her recipes online. What a treasure trove of family recipes and cooking tips: “If water or sauce is too salty, add a peeled potato and some of the excess will be absorbed.” “To keep potatoes from budding, place an apple in the bag with them.” Who knew?
Our holiday drawer is stuffed with various haggadot, and each one tells a story – not only about leaving Egypt but also about the stages our family seders have gone through. There’s the Maxwell House Haggadah that our parents, like 50 million other Americans, got as a free promotion when they bought a can of coffee. The preschool Haggadah, where we’d all belt out: “Frogs here, frogs there, frogs are jumping everywhere.” The super-inclusive Haggadah from the years the kids studied with a Reconstructionist rabbi, and the homemade one that we pieced together with the readings we like – and we left out the ones we don’t!
We recently read about a host who has her guests sign their name and the date in the haggadah each year. She has a record of everyone who has sat around her Passover table. Wish we had thought of that 30 years ago.
We’re thinking about having our guests sign in at the seder. But we have all the holiday objects infused with memories to remind us – and we’re counting on our kids to carry on the traditions. When they tell us that they used the brass seder plate from Bubbie and Grandmom Pearl’s 1950s china – we’re happy.
Wishing you a zissen Pesach.
