Open Thread: Passover

So it has come to my attention that we are right smack dab in the middle of Passover week!

(I don't have a cool picture, sadly, because the public domain picture site I usually go to has zero-count'em-zero free pictures for Passover. As an experiment, I searched a few other holidays around this time of year. It also had zero free pictures for Ostara, Equinox, Nowruz, and Honen Matsuri. There were five pages worth of free pictures for Easter though. Hrm.)

Anyway.

Even though I'm not Jewish, I have fond memories of Passover. Our "best friend family" (as in, me and the daughter were best friends, our brothers were best friends, our mothers were best friends, and our fathers... tolerated each other) was Jewish. And as a kid, having your best friend follow a different religion from you was, yes, educational and enlightening and all that, but the MOST important part was: DOUBLE HOLIDAYS!! So we all got together to celebrate Passover and Easter and Hannukah and Christmas.

My memories include: sitting on the front step while J and A taught us how to correctly say various Hebrew prayers. Trying to make sandwiches from matzo crackers. The sticky-sweet taste of Manischewitz wine, which to this day I'm convinced the grown-ups had us drink in order to convince us that we didn't like alcohol. My friend's dad cracking the same stupid joke every year ("Oh, those poor little matzos!") when the matzo ball soup was served. (...Give it a minute.)

And the fleeting sense, during quieter moments, that I was being given a rare glimpse into something old and sacred and completely different from my own traditions.

Open Thread! What, if anything, does Passover mean to you? If you're not Jewish, have you ever had the chance to celebrate it, and if so, under what circumstances? Do you feel any strong connections to holidays or traditions that are not, strictly speaking, "yours"? (For whatever you choose to mean by that.) What other holidays are going on around this time of year that we should know about, and how does one celebrate them?

 ~Kristycat

Wednesday Reminder! Open threads are meant to be fun, chatty places to discuss anything that doesn’t “fit” into a deconstruction or other regular thread. This can be something totally off-the-wall and random, or it can be something interesting that a deconstruction prompted you to think of, but which would be derailing to get into in the deconstruction thread. When in doubt, move it over here - that’s what it’s for!