Every year I come up with new ideas on how to decorate a sukkah. This year for the first time I led a group of children, teens, and adults in creating sukkah decorations.
What is a Sukkah?
A sukkah is a temporary structure that Jews eat (and a few sleep) in during the fall holiday of Sukkot. It is topped with natural materials such as branches or bamboo. I enjoy decorating our sukkah. This gives the whole experience an extra hiddur mitzvah (beautification of a good deed).
What Kinds of Decorations?
Living in the Northeast of the U.S., the weather is unpredictable in the early fall. It often rains. So we have to waterproof our decorations as much as possible. To find ideas for decorations, I started looking up: “waterproof loop chains”. Having no success with that search, I soon learned that I should just look up “sukkah decorations”.
A sukkah has four walls. It also has schach, branches or slats of natural material that cover the top. In my mind, the decorations are divided into wall pictures and top hangings. If you have a solid wall on at least one side, that works for wall pictures.
When I was growing up, we had a canvas sukkah. It was hard to decorate the sides of canvas. So we hung decorations from the top. I have memories of sitting in the kitchen with my mother z”l, stringing cranberries.
In this post I will present different kinds of decorations.
Laminated Pictures
This is a laminated collage that I created with some cutouts and a printed Hebrew bruchim habaim (Welcome). I typed the letters in Hebrew using Gimp, a free software program. The cutouts are all from magazines or old flyers except for the ink sheep. I drew that one a few months ago. I colored in the letters with Derwent colored pencils.
When my children were little, they would bring home all kinds of laminated pictures. Many of these are still hung in our sukkah each year. The walls of our sukkah are covered with laminated pictures.
Pictures can have text, photos, glued cut outs from magazines or drawings. You can use crayons, markers, colored pencil or paint. I like adding new family photos to our sukkah each year. You can use hook and loop adhesives to attach your laminated picture. Hook and loop tape comes in rolls. One side is fuzzy. They easily attach and detach from each other. It makes it easy to re-use the pictures each year. I have bought hook and loop tape in the past on Amazon. This year I bought a few rolls of different sizes from the sewing company called Wawak.
One good idea for a sukkah picture is make a collage. First, take a photo. Then cut all kinds of magazine pieces, construction paper, and pretty papers. Place the photo in the center of a standard 8.5 x 11 printer paper. Create a design around the photo with cut outs. It can be color-themed, look like a sukkah, or just be whatever appeals to you. Once you are happy with the design, glue everything into place. Then run it through the laminator.
Last year I bought a laminator. You can find them on Amazon for not too much money. I used to struggle with clear contact paper to cover photos. A laminator is much easier. You also need to buy special plastic sleeves to enclose your photo or picture. This is a fun craft project for children or for seniors.
Loops and Chains
A traditional sukkah decoration is a long chain of loops. One could make paper loops in a sukkah. However, these are not waterproof. This year we made loops out of colorful plastic cable ties. You can buy colorful plastic ties on Amazon. You can see the loops in the pictures below of the etrog sun catcher and the plastic bottles apple.
Etrog Sun Catchers
I found a blog post on creating these bright citron sun catchers. You need yellow cellophane (available on Amazon), yellow or orange construction paper, scissors, clear plastic tape, and string. The tricky part is the cutting of the paper. Other than that, I found children of varying ages were able to make these.
Someone in our group used red cellophane to create a big pomegranate. I am thinking next year I will buy purple cellophane so we can make grape sun catchers.
Apples Out of Bottle Bottoms
These apples from plastic bottles are a bit challenging to make. Children would need supervision and help to make them. First, you have to collect plastic water bottles with bumpy bottoms and with smoother bottoms. You create the apple by putting one plastic bottle top on the top and the bumpy one on the bottom. You add bits of red cellophane and/or red fabric to the inside. Green leaves go on top. I did the leaves with felt and sewed two leaves together. Then I glued them to the top of the apple. If you want to introduce hand sewing to someone, this is a good project to try. The hardest part is making two holes on the top of the apple in the plastic.
I am hoping to find even more projects to decorate the sukkah for next year.
Happy 5786! Hope you and your family have a happy, sweet new year.
Before Pesach we have a custom of burning chametz (bread, crackers, cereal, pasta, anything made of five grains: wheat, barley, rye, oats and spelt). When I was a kid, I remember burning chametz in our backyard. Now there are laws about creating fires, so observant Jews get special permission to burn chametz. This burning took place in Edison, New Jersey.
A tradition we have in our family (and others do as well) is to burn the lulav, the palm branch left over from Sukkot, the fall holiday in which we sit in a booth outside for a week.
In this photo you can see both lulavim (plural of lulav) and real bread. It got quite smokey – my husband doesn’t remember it being so smokey in the past. Maybe this is because the regular Edison staff were on vacation for Good Friday and a nice person was left in charge who didn’t quite manage the smoke? I don’t know, but I left there sniffing my clothes, wondering if I smelt like someone who had walked into a smokey bar.
I had enough time to attend biur chametz (burning of the chametz) this year because I managed to get all the cooking I had planned the day before and early in the morning. One of the most popular dishes among my sister-in-law’s family that I made was mushroom paté; personally, my favorite was the marinated beets with ginger and garlic. Planning to make both of those again tomorrow.
Etrog, watercolor on paper by Leora Wenger, October 2011
What is beauty? Is it the Doryphorus, as the Greeks believed, the young man with the slender, slightly bent posture? According to Judaism, strangely enough, the elderly are considered beautiful, as it says in Kedoshim 19:32 –
“Rise in the presence of the aged and honor the face of the old man”
מִפְּנֵי שֵׂיבָה תָּקוּם, וְהָדַרְתָּ פְּנֵי זָקֵן
Honor the face of an old man could also be translated as “ascribe beauty to the elderly.” Who has knowledge like an elderly person? Who has overcome so much and come so far?
Note the word used here: hadar. Hadar is also used to describe the etrog. Unlike other fruits, the other “lives” for a long time on the tree and does not fall off on its own. The word in Hebrew is dar, similar to hadar. Does the etrog watercolor remind one of an older person? How?
(Credit for these ideas goes to Rabbi Bassous, for helping me remember parts of his speech to my husband, and for help with locating the pasuk to my middle son).
In honor of my father, my favorite elderly person, and in memory of my aunt, my father’s older sister who died earlier this year and who lived admirably as an older person (she was also an artist). In memory of my dear mother – her yahrzeit is next week. And in memory of Linda Greenberg, who tragically lost her battle with cancer this week and will never experience old age.
I really would have liked to have photographed some of the blue jays I saw yesterday. Instead, here’s a rudbeckia from a yard in which I emphasized the blue background with Photoshop.
When I put this photo of tiny asters on my computer, I noticed a tiny flying insect enjoyed the flowers even more than I did.
Ugly red berries (maybe you like them?) are growing on a tree in my backyard.
I finally filled my bird feeder again. I left it alone all summer, as birds seem to love my compost in the summer. But I’m trying to get in the habit of filling it, so in the winter the birds will know they can show up for a nosh. This sparrow seems to have already helped himself – do you think he is digesting his meal before flying off? Or is that only something humans do?
Next week is Sukkot and the week after Simhat Torah-Shemini Atzeret, so I won’t have much time for blogging or Nature Notes. On Sukkot we do have some contact with nature – in particular, we sit outside in a sukkah for all our meals. One can see see the stars through the roof of the sukkah (assuming it’s a clear night). Can any of my Jewish friends explain to my non-Jewish readers a few other natural elements of Sukkot?
How pretty when the buds of my chrysanthemum start to show red. Last week, those buds were closed and green.
This sole red petunia graces the front of my front yard. My other petunias are mostly fuchsia.
This is what the men in my family (my husband and two sons) were doing while I photographed fall flowers – they were taking down our sukkah, the temporary dwelling that we eat in for one week each fall. At this point, all the decorations were already down. The panels are sort of red – a brown that is a cousin of red, perhaps.
We are in the middle of celebrating the holiday of Sukkot, in which observant Jews around the world eat (some sleep) outside in little booths called Sukkot (singular = sukkah). With my son’s guidance, this post will teach how to create a sukkah decoration (recipes vary wildly from family to family – there are no set traditions for decorations).
Ingredients:
1 creative, artistic mind
paper
1 box of markers
1 pencil for initial sketch
Clear contact paper for laminating
First my son drew the initial sketch with pencil. Then he painstakingly colored in the drawing:
The spaceships have no religious significance. The Hebrew says “Brukhim Ha’Baim” – Welcome to All Those Who Come, which is a common greeting to put at an entrance to a sukkah. You can see those words on the front of our sukkah at the bottom of this post.
When the drawing is complete, one cuts some clear contact paper slightly bigger on all sides than the drawing. Then one cuts one more piece of contact paper the same size as the first. Carefully peel off the backing and place the contact paper on both sides of the drawing.
Here is the drawing hanging in our sukkah. There are also a lot of red apples in the sukkah; my son made a game for our guests of “count the apples” – he claimed we had 50 apples pictured in the decorations.
Here is a photo of the sukkah from further back. Unfortunately, this may be the last year of this sukkah. My husband says it takes too long to put up (he created it himself), and it is also not big enough for hosting guests. So we may get a new one, probably a pre-fab that is easier to put up.
Wednesday morning I did this little watercolor of an arava leaf (you might recognize it as a willow leaf, its name in English). It is one of the many natural symbols in the upcoming holiday of Sukkot, which starts on Monday night, Oct. 13. I actually was only looking at one leaf, which I painted a few times on the same piece of watercolor paper. My son planted a little willow branch in the backyard this year, and I was afraid if I took off more than one leaf off the little “tree”, there wouldn’t be much tree left. My other son agreed that I should put some compost around the edges of the little plant. It certainly has been getting enough water, as we’ve had rain on and off lately. Maybe I’ll photograph our little willow for another post.
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