We are pretty good guests. We bring a dish, we offer to help serve and
clear, and most important, we hugely appreciate being guests. Despite
having cabinets and closets full of daily plates and glasses and barely
used formal dishes, we have rarely hosted any dinner party.
Passover can be a huge dinner party. A Seder, the special Passover meal,
involving both ceremonial and traditional foods, is a giant
undertaking, and one for which I have been a guest pretty much my whole
life. Not this year.
A few weeks ago, we found out that our usual Seder spot was not to be.
Relatives would be traveling, meaning that we would be on our own. Would
we try to be guests somewhere else? We are good guests, after all. Or
would we go it alone, perhaps even become full-fledged hosts?
After several weeks of pondering it all (or not really dealing with it,
depending on your point of view), I settled on the answer this weekend,
and tonight (yes, I know, a night early), I hosted Passover for the very
first time.
The guests? Just us, plus one. A day early? Well, at least I'd be home
to cook, and set the table, and have the brainpower to figure out what was
needed. The readings? From a single Haggadah that has been on my
bookshelf for as long as I can remember.
It was an evening of improv, really. Improvising how much of anything to make. Improvising who would read what.
Improvising the exact order in which we'd eat the foods I'd managed to
assemble and prepare. But in the end, not only were we stuffed, as if
we had been to someone else's home for the Seder, we had (if briefly)
told the Passover story, complete with questions and plagues and opening
doors and mispronunciations of unfamiliar words. It might not have been
our normal holiday tradition, but it was an evening that I will
remember for a long time. We took a holiday during which we normally
just show up as guests, and we made it our own. We cooked and we ate and we learned
a little something about freedom along the way.
Whether by choice or out of necessity, we are sometimes called upon to
take over. To do more than just show up. To make the decisions, and, in doing so, to make our own new traditions.
And sometimes that can be the most
freeing experience of all.
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