Post of Explanation
Sep. 24th, 2007 09:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tanarillSo, I now have nine bites from some kind of biting thing, which was in my bed. (It’s not there now, or it’s died, as I didn’t acquire any new bites last night.) They itch abominably, unless I slap massive amounts of hydrocortisone on and leave it there. I honestly think I’d prefer acne.
Yesterday, my family built our sukkah. These are like tree forts, but without the tree, or a real ceiling. I’ll explain, but put it behind a cut so you don’t have to read it.
I hope you remember the Omer, which was me counting of the weeks of the spring harvest. I know, a little hard to fathom: a spring harvest? But in fact, in Israel, it’s warm enough that you can get three crops a year if you do it right, two at the minimum. The crops you grow in the winter are the ones that need more water, since winter in Israel is about sixty degrees but feels forty because it’s also gray, drizzly, and windy. In other words, the weather is absolute misery, but good for things like wheat and barley.
Once your spring harvest is done and you’ve had Shavuot to celebrate, you put the next crop in the ground. The summer crop was generally a legume, like peas or lentils, as well as spring barely. These did not require the same amount of water as the winter crops, which is good because summer in Israel is hot and dry, and legumes can be nitrogen fixers. So they started the next crop around Shavuot, and harvested it around Sukkot.
The other thing you harvest around Sukkot are fruits, but because fruit trees are a long-term thing, they’re treated slightly differently. But you harvest them along with the summer crop. So you have lentils and/or beans, date, palms, pomegranates, grapes (and consequently wine), and olives (also useful for olive oil) all being harvested. And, you understand, you have to put the winter crop in the ground almost as soon as this is done, because otherwise you’ll miss the winter rain.
So, in order to meet the need for very quickly harvesting all this stuff before it rots in the fields, you build temporary shelters. For the few weeks of the harvest, you live in these, and they also provide storage for the crops until you can get them back to your grain processing place. (It takes a lot top process grain without machinery, and often all the women in a community would spend weeks after the harvest doing it.) These harvest-shelters are called “Sukkot,” (sue-coat) a word which literally means booth.
There are a lot of demands made of a sukkah, mostly put in place so you don’t cheat on it. There must be at least three walls, so you can’t have an open-sided thing and call it a sukkah. You must be able to see the stars through the roof of the sukkah. This is a pain, because the way it was done back then was to loosely thatch it, but these days it means four hours of cutting vegetation and getting it onto the fish netting you’ve strung up. You have to be careful not to put anything flowery up there, either, because flowers=bees. The walls of the sukkah must be a certain height, so you can’t do lean-tos, although three walls may be permanent (meaning you only build the remaining walls) if you have more than three walls. Etc, etc.
My family’s sukkah is made primarily of snap-together PVC tubing and canvas tarp. And fish netting, of course, to hold the vegetation. And lots of bungee ties, to hold the tarp to the frame and the tarp to the tarp and the netting to everything. It’s an all-day thing, really. When I was younger we used to do things like make daisy chains to decorate it, but daisy chains generally end up wet, then rotting. If you put up gourds and corn, the squirrels will find a way to get at them.
Some of the really religious groups will actually sleep in their sukkahs, but I suspect it’s because you can get away with stuff like that in Israel. What we who live in the frozen North do is eat meals in the sukkah. Or, in more realistic terms, we get eaten in the sukkah. Because, let’s face it, it’s mosquito season, and vespids tend to come around looking for sugary liquids like wine and pop. Traditionally, you’re supposed be a guest or have a guest each of the eight days, probably because misery loves company.
I think that’s enough discussion of this holiday for right now. When our lulav and etrog come in, I will tell you about those too. They’re plants used in the observation of the holiday, and afterward used to make the sock drawer smell nice . . . look, I’ll explain next time, okay?
So to get vegetation for our sukkah, we generally ignore a section of the yard each year, and allow it to grow HUGE MASSIVE weeds, which have to be cut down with a chainsaw.
They have spikes.
So now in addition to painful insect bites, I have plant scratches. And later today I get to give my term presentation to my boss’s boss, which is just a bit imposing. On the plus side, Rags has returned from her addiction to WoW, and has already started feeding the crackbunnies that live in my brain.
Rags, I missed you. And I am soooooo very happy that you are back :D
Yesterday, my family built our sukkah. These are like tree forts, but without the tree, or a real ceiling. I’ll explain, but put it behind a cut so you don’t have to read it.
I hope you remember the Omer, which was me counting of the weeks of the spring harvest. I know, a little hard to fathom: a spring harvest? But in fact, in Israel, it’s warm enough that you can get three crops a year if you do it right, two at the minimum. The crops you grow in the winter are the ones that need more water, since winter in Israel is about sixty degrees but feels forty because it’s also gray, drizzly, and windy. In other words, the weather is absolute misery, but good for things like wheat and barley.
Once your spring harvest is done and you’ve had Shavuot to celebrate, you put the next crop in the ground. The summer crop was generally a legume, like peas or lentils, as well as spring barely. These did not require the same amount of water as the winter crops, which is good because summer in Israel is hot and dry, and legumes can be nitrogen fixers. So they started the next crop around Shavuot, and harvested it around Sukkot.
The other thing you harvest around Sukkot are fruits, but because fruit trees are a long-term thing, they’re treated slightly differently. But you harvest them along with the summer crop. So you have lentils and/or beans, date, palms, pomegranates, grapes (and consequently wine), and olives (also useful for olive oil) all being harvested. And, you understand, you have to put the winter crop in the ground almost as soon as this is done, because otherwise you’ll miss the winter rain.
So, in order to meet the need for very quickly harvesting all this stuff before it rots in the fields, you build temporary shelters. For the few weeks of the harvest, you live in these, and they also provide storage for the crops until you can get them back to your grain processing place. (It takes a lot top process grain without machinery, and often all the women in a community would spend weeks after the harvest doing it.) These harvest-shelters are called “Sukkot,” (sue-coat) a word which literally means booth.
There are a lot of demands made of a sukkah, mostly put in place so you don’t cheat on it. There must be at least three walls, so you can’t have an open-sided thing and call it a sukkah. You must be able to see the stars through the roof of the sukkah. This is a pain, because the way it was done back then was to loosely thatch it, but these days it means four hours of cutting vegetation and getting it onto the fish netting you’ve strung up. You have to be careful not to put anything flowery up there, either, because flowers=bees. The walls of the sukkah must be a certain height, so you can’t do lean-tos, although three walls may be permanent (meaning you only build the remaining walls) if you have more than three walls. Etc, etc.
My family’s sukkah is made primarily of snap-together PVC tubing and canvas tarp. And fish netting, of course, to hold the vegetation. And lots of bungee ties, to hold the tarp to the frame and the tarp to the tarp and the netting to everything. It’s an all-day thing, really. When I was younger we used to do things like make daisy chains to decorate it, but daisy chains generally end up wet, then rotting. If you put up gourds and corn, the squirrels will find a way to get at them.
Some of the really religious groups will actually sleep in their sukkahs, but I suspect it’s because you can get away with stuff like that in Israel. What we who live in the frozen North do is eat meals in the sukkah. Or, in more realistic terms, we get eaten in the sukkah. Because, let’s face it, it’s mosquito season, and vespids tend to come around looking for sugary liquids like wine and pop. Traditionally, you’re supposed be a guest or have a guest each of the eight days, probably because misery loves company.
I think that’s enough discussion of this holiday for right now. When our lulav and etrog come in, I will tell you about those too. They’re plants used in the observation of the holiday, and afterward used to make the sock drawer smell nice . . . look, I’ll explain next time, okay?
So to get vegetation for our sukkah, we generally ignore a section of the yard each year, and allow it to grow HUGE MASSIVE weeds, which have to be cut down with a chainsaw.
They have spikes.
So now in addition to painful insect bites, I have plant scratches. And later today I get to give my term presentation to my boss’s boss, which is just a bit imposing. On the plus side, Rags has returned from her addiction to WoW, and has already started feeding the crackbunnies that live in my brain.
Rags, I missed you. And I am soooooo very happy that you are back :D
