October is holiday season for Jews. There are the high holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. But then, after those, comes the best holiday of all: Sukkot!
Sukkot is 8 days long. During that time, you build a fort, or sukkah, and you live in it. Amazing! One of the things I've held onto from childhood is an undying love for building forts. When I heard about Sukkot I thought, "finally, here is a holiday that rivals Christmas!"
Of course, most regular Jews don't move into their sukkahs, they just eat some meals in them. And like everything else in Judaism, there are a lot of contradictory rules about how to make one. I decided to keep things cheap and simple and build a PVC pipe sukkah with tarp walls and thin wooden slats for an open roof.
This wasn't my first sukkah. Last year I became totally obsessed with building a sukkah the day before Sukkot, and went on a frantic 6AM trip to Lowe's to buy materials. I bought PVC pipes and a hacksaw, but they didn't have the right joinery. So I improvised with some spare parts I found in plumbing. That ended up being a mistake.
Another mistake: trying to build the sukkah by myself. To be fair, I wasn't totally alone, I had Roan to "help" me. I'd bought buckets and sand to anchor the vertical pipes, only they kept toppling over before I could get the joinery and horizontal pipes attached, because a certain toddler kept shoveling out all the sand. I finally got it up, hung blankets for walls, and was so excited that I called all my friends to come over and celebrate. They did, bless their hearts, and the damn thing collapsed in the first mild breeze, with 4 toddlers inside.
R.I.P. sukkah 2010. You only lived 3 short hours, but you taught me a lot. After two more trips to competing hardware stores I finally ordered the correct joinery online and retired the sukkah materials until 2011.
And now Sukkot has come again! With Jay's help and all the right hardware, we built our fort in less than 2 hours. Then we decorated it with white Christmas lights. I waited a full 24 hours to make sure it was stable before planning a Sukkot party.
5 kids from Roan's preschool came over to celebrate. It was raining so we had to eat inside, but after dinner the rain stopped so the adults sat in the sukkah and kids chased each other around the yard in circles, only coming into the fort when they had an injury. When hosting a party, it is sometimes hard to sit down, have a beer, and truly relax. Yet I did just that in the sukkah, at full dark with the lights blazing and kids running all around, screaming with laughter. It felt like we were in the eye of a storm. I took a moment to bask in my accomplishments: the sukkah was stable, my son was happy, nobody needed anything from the kitchen. I was living the good life.
I didn't take any pictures that night. But here are some shots of the sukkah in daylight, with two of the walls rolled up:
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