Tu B'Shevat parsley for Pesach karpas

Tu B’Shevat is the New Year and/or Birthday of the Trees, but the classic Tu B’Shevat planting activity doesn’t really have much to do with trees. We plant parsley.  All over America, little Jewish kids plant parsley seeds on Tu B’Shevat.  Sounds like Sunday School in Chelm, right?  But it does make sense.  To germinate parsley seeds and use the plant two holidays later as the karpas on a Passover seder plate connects our earliest Spring holiday to our main Spring holiday, and it lets kids get their fingers dirty fostering green life from dormant seeds. Tu B’Shevat is the official start of the agricultural year, when tree sap (and all lifeforce by extension) begins to rise after winter rest.

Parsley, though, is not a tree. It’s easier, folks say, easier than planting a tree with a classroom of children.  Maybe, but parsley isn’t foolproof (or Chelm-proof).  The seeds are slow to germinate, and a two month headstart before Passover  isn’t enough time to grow an amount of curly parsley anyone would describe as generous.  Still, it’s worth it. Anytime kids can grow or make stuff for the holidays—real stuff that gets used—it’s worth it. And this activity has the bonus of linking nature and gardening to Jewishness, which is an invaluable connection to grow.

HOW TO PLANT PARSLEY (KARPAS) WITH KIDS:

Note that parsley seeds are teeny and can be difficult for a very young child to handle. Having an adult sprinkle the nearly invisible seeds from a paper packet into a child’s pot is not much fun, and no one ends up learning anything.  Better to let the child touch the magical seeds and put them onto the magical dirt. See below.

I’ve honed a planting method that works well with any age, from toddlers on up, and with one child or dozens…

The child will:

1. decorate a small pot (oil pastels are lovely on terra cotta) (or, just use a plastic or paper drinking cup with a hole punched in the bottom)
2. fill pot with good potting soil up to about an inch from the top
3. wet the soil with a watering can (and a pan underneath to catch the overflow)
4. stick moist thumb into a shallow, flat dish of the seeds (like a pie pan, but the pan color should contrast with the seeds so the seeds are visible)
5. scrape whatever seeds are stuck to the thumb onto the dirt
6. add a bit of soil to cover seeds
7. moisten top of soil with sprayer or mister
8. set in a sunny spot and keep moist

The leader will:

1. Show a bunch of mature parsley.  Pass it around to let kids smell, touch and taste. (“This is what you’ve planted today…”)
2. Show a real seder plate with a depiction of Karpas on it (“This is where your parsley will go in just a few weeks….”)

Having these two props are crucial for young kids to really grasp what they are doing and why. Real, concrete, Show and Tell props are super conversation starters and can generate lots of questions. Don’t know the answers?  Find them out together.

GARDENING TIPS:

Start an extra pot or two to keep. Transplant it into the garden or a bigger pot when it outgrows the original container.  Parsley is a biennial.  By next year, it’ll be plenty big enough to use for a seder, even if you’ve been harvesting it (snipping stems for kitchen use) all along.  And as a biennial, it will flower the second year, giving you blooms for gorgeous Swallowtail butterflies.  Parsley, along with other members of the carrot family like Queen Anne’s lace, is the preferred host plant of Swallowtail larvae. Plus, the spent flowers will set seed and provide many more planting projects for the future.

Vocabulary:

Chelm: in Jewish folktales, a village of fools.
Tu B’Shevat literally means the fifteenth day of Shevat (a month in the Jewish calendar). See this page at MyJewishLearning.com for an overview of the holiday.

Edible playdo ingredients

Buying corn syrup just feels wrong.  I usually go out of my way to avoid corn syrup in foods, so buying a full, glistening bottle of Karo on purpose is just weird.  Yesterday, I felt so conspicuous slipping it into my grocery cart, I might as well have been buying sex toys or country ham or People magazine.

It was worth it.  The nervous guilt at the cash register has faded, and the recipe for edible playdough—featuring corn syrup—worked just fine.

Here’s what happened today:

I had some new Aleph Bet cookie cutters to try out, and my son’s Sunday School teacher okayed my idea to bring in some edible playdough.  The kids selected the cutter letters that were part of their current unit: a kaf, yud, pey and hey, which spell kipah (Hebrew for yarmulke, which is Yiddish for, as my Dad used to say, “those beanies.”).

Kipah

Here’s the recipe I used, but many more are on online.  Some versions have to be cooked, some involve pulverized baked goods, but this one is nearly instant: just stir, knead and go. The amounts below make more than enough for six kids to play with, and allows for the inevitable blob or two that will fall on the floor and get stepped on.

2 cups creamy peanut butter (substitute soy butter if allergies are an issue)
2 cups confectioner’s sugar
2 cups powdered milk
1 3/4 cups corn syrup

Not the healthiest snack perhaps, but most kids barely nibbled. Knowing that they could eat their own playdough seemed to satisfy them, even if they didn’t actually chow down terribly much.

Plastic protects the table from oil

The tricky part for very young kids is figuring out which side of the cookie cutter is the “right” side, and then realizing that the side that makes cutting easier also happens to be the side that results in dough letters that are not backward.  How do they know when a letter is backward? Here’s where a visual aid comes in handy: a chart or poster of the letters. It’s best to use one with a font that matches the cutters (see links below).

We had a couple of play rolling-pins, which are always fun, but children can also squish a blob of dough flat by pressing a sturdy plate straight down.  Glass plates are neat because kids can visually gauge when they’ve transformed a blob into something fairly flat and level.

We used cookie cutters today, but kids can also shape letters without them.  They just roll little logs of dough and arrange into the right configurations. They can build to match the visual reference you provide, whether straight-sided or curvy.  See links below for different charts to print.

Kids can help prepare the dough.  It’s pretty darn sticky until it reaches the rollable stage, so use a long-handled, sturdy spoon for stirring.  You don’t want to scare the tactile-challenged kids before they even start.  I mix this in advance if I’m not sure of the texture-tolerance of the group.  Call me over-cautious, but I’ve been puked on and shall therefore remain wary.

Honestly, this recipe doesn’t keep well.  It’s best for a one-time, mix-right-then activity.  I’d like to find a normal cookie dough recipe that doesn’t call for eggs (for safety) or corn syrup (for sanity), so the nutritional content is a bit more reasonable. That way, when the kids measure and mix, they are exercising practical kitchen skills, they can nibble, and we have the option to bake the finished letters.  But for a nearly instant activity, today’s adventure worked well. And anything that creates a link between Hebrew and sweetness and fun is a winner.

Cookie Cutters:

The letters in the plastic set we used today (from Shulsinger Judaica) are about 2″ high. I also have a gorgeous metal set from Kosher Cook, which are a bit bigger (they range up to 3″).  For very young children, the plastic is easier to manipulate and to figure out which side is the right one for cutting. Both are sold at OyToys.com.

Hebrew Charts ready to print online:

Behrman House Publishers have a Hebrew Writing Chart pdf.  Note that some of the letters are still slightly curvy. Very young kids may need help interpreting the curves into straight logs of dough.  Still, it’s free…

EKS Publishing Co. has a great chart for $1.50: “Handy Hebrew Writing Guide.” Includes names of letters. This is my favorite. All letters are composed of strictly straight lines, which makes it easy to interpret into straight logs of dough (or pretzel sticks). Here’s a bigger image to preview, offered by the shop And Thou Shalt Read.com.

Hebrew Writing Chart from Ahklah.com

Akhlah.com offers this chart with directional arrows that show how to write (or form with materials) each letter.  Unfortunately, there are no letter names, so it assumes prior knowledge.  It’s a pdf ready to print.

Akhlah.com also has this nice pdf to print, which shows the letter names, but the font is the fancier block kind, like you’ll find in a siddur (prayer book), plus the script (cursive).

Edible PlayDough recipes: 

at MakingFriends.com

at Cooks.com

at MakePlayDough.com

Thank you, Ms. L, for letting me visit and play today! 

Distributor Cap Hanukkah Menorah

Note: I didn’t allow for holiday mail delays when I placed my AutoZone.com order.  Let’s pretend this installment actually appeared during Hanukkah.

A hanukkah menorah made out of a repurposed V8 distributor cap is not kosher, I’ll admit.  But it sure is cute, and if you live with a car freak, satisfyingly thematic.  The function of a distributor cap is all about fire—or at least sparks: it’s part of the ignition system and it helps distribute or control the path of the current.

And Hanukkah is all about fire, right?  The miraculous distribution of that wee bit of fuel?

I chose a V8 (eight cylinder engine) distributor cap because it has 9 holes, and I chose this one because the central hole was higher than rest.  A circular menorah is a no-no——we must see a straight line  of flames, says the Talmud, lest we miscount them or lest our neighbors imagine a pagan conflagration suited for Mt. Carmel and the minions of Ba’al——but at least my shammash candleholder is positioned in a manner that distinguishes it from the others.

Distributor Cap, before conversion

I do not live with a car freak now, but I grew up with one.  My dad had three garages, a carport and a driveway filled with both vintage Studebakers and assorted British and American makes and models.  I saw engine bits scattered here and yon, including distributor caps, and since the caps had to be replaced periodically, some of the damaged ones got pressed into workbench service as upright storage for grease pencils and screwdrivers.  Like a tool candelabra.  Naturally, in my head, I saw nine candles.  But not at the time.  The distributor cap/hanukkah candle epiphany didn’t ignite till decades later.  Till now.

So, this trayfe (not kosher) menorah is a tribute to my Dad, long gone, who himself was trayfe.  He was a Knoxville boy, born and bred, an elder in the neighborhood Presbyterian church and probably never saw a menorah in his life till he saw mine.  Wish he could see this one.

Happy Hanukkah, Dad.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Resources:

• Menorah rules.  But hey, for the record, I would never pass judgement on anyone else’s menorah configuration or Hanukkah bush or Christmaskkah tree.  This needs to be made clear in a blog that mentions rules and regs rather frequently.  I find the rules fascinating, as is keeping them in mind when I create ritual art or edible tchotchkes or whatever. But rules, like everything, are open to interpretation and levels of observance.  Ain’t nobody’s business what anyone does, really.
• AutoZone page whence I found this particular cap, compatible with several  Studebakers

The toy car posing with my hanukkiyah is a 1951 Studebaker Commander: the “bullet-nose.”  My favorite, whether mini or life-sized.

an interesting development

My nearly-five-year-old knows how to address an envelope, where to put the return address sticker and where to put a stamp.

What I didn’t realize was that he intended to put these skills into practice with a letter: “Too Santa.”

How does he even know from writing a letter to Santa?  I’m guessing the concept has been tossed around in his classroom, where he is one of only two Jewish kids.  He sure didn’t hear about it at home, via conversation or television or any other domestic source.  We’d been too busy making menorahs and dreidels to even talk about someone else’s party. (“Someone else’s party” = Christmas.)

The only reason I know he wrote a letter to Santa is because I just happened to notice him reach for the stamps.  I saw the addressee, and miraculously, I kept my mouth shut.  Later on, I asked him what was in the letter.

“It’s not a letter,” he said, “it’s a picture. You know, from the newspaper.”  His grandma was in town, and where there is Grandma there are newspaper circulars.

“What kind of picture?” I asked.

“Of an iPhone.”

An iPhone: something else, besides Santa, he has never, ever seen.

So he didn’t have the courtesy to write a proper letter of entreaty?  No supplication or polite petition?  He simply submits a visual order form?   What a shanda to the goy of all goyim.  And for an iPhone?  Whose kid is this?  Our family doesn’t even have texting.  Our phones are bricks.

I pondered this for a few days and then asked him why he wanted an iPhone.   “I don’t. It’s for you.”

Oh.
Well, alrighty, then.

LEGO minifig menorah

Couldn’t help myself.

Happy 8th night, y’all.

(We only had 6 LEGO dragon flames (aka “torch flame”), so I used “fire” flames for nights 1 and 8.)

My other LEGO stuff for Hanukkah:

Flameless LEGO menorahs
LEGO menorah with candles
LEGO dreidels

Hanukkah Gelt S'more

Hanukkah lasts eight days, eight looooong days. Gelt S’mores help keep things lively.

And today being Christmas, Gelt S’mores also help cut the post-prandial greasiness from the lunch buffet lo mein.

Ours were made with Paskesz marshmallows my husband schlepped back from a Baltimore grocery store.  While he was there doing my bidding, I actually discovered my Nashville Whole Foods sells kosher Elyon marshmallow all year-round.  I caused quite a scene at the service counter, clutching a bag of Elyon and gushing my thanks and assuring them that no other store in town sells kosher mallows except at Passover and that I’d tell my kosher buddies where to go.  Apparently, Whole Foods stock Elyon “because they are vegan.”  But is fish gelatin vegan?  My vegan friends would not touch fish gelatin with a 39-and-a-half-foot pole.

Dark chocolate Hanukkah Gelt S'more

So, no more Jersey kosher care packages from my sister-in-law?  No more grocery orders when my husband takes a business trip?  No more bulk buys from kosher.com?  Yes, an era has passed.

A great miracle happened here: kosher marshmallows year-’round in Nashville.  A game-changer, for sure.

links:

Wrote about Passover S’mores with chocolate matzah, here.

Wrote about kosher marshmallows all over the place, because I am obsessed with them. Most recently, the post about Edible Dreidels, here.

History of S’mores, here.

We learned that using food dye to color the “flames” orange is not worth the trouble.  After the challah is baked, the food color merges with the golden egg wash.  But it was fun to try, and now we have orange palms for the rest of the day.

The unattractive dreidels not pictured here were formed freehand.  The nice ones were made by snipping a fat rope of dough with kindergarten scissors.  We shared creative control when it came to forming the letters.  He’s fine with writing dreidel letters on big marshmallows using food-safe markers, but not forming them out of dough this tiny.

Way back when I started baking Jewily, my mother-in-law gave me The Hallah Book: Recipes, History and Traditions, by Freda Reider (Ktav, 1986).  It had groovy shapes for every holiday and occasion: bird, hamsah, ladder, etrog, menorah and so on.  I got rid of it in a fit of de-cluttering years ago, but having a little kid underfoot again makes me want it back.  I’ve just ordered a used copy from a second-hand shop.

I know I can find all that stuff online nowadays, but I love having a real book in hand, especially a no-frills, low-budget, earnest tome such as this one.  And the fact that it connects the rapidly-decaying me with the pre-parent me is a bonus.  A bridge of baking.

For most challah, including the Menorah and Dreidel versions, I use Joan Nathan’s kid-friendly challah recipe in The Children’s Jewish Holiday Kitchen, but with Rapid Rise yeast.  Rapid Rise is the difference between me making the time to bake challah and me not.

links:

Speaking of challah shaped outside-the-braid, it’s always fun to see the challot at Kemach Torah, formed to complement the week’s Torah portion.

Kveller has a Menorah Challah courtesy of Meredith Jacobs.

If you have a link to a Menorah Challah, holler and I’ll add it.

LEGO minifig menorah

Ok, ok, I knew posting about a LEGO menorah that holds real Hanukkah candles might cause trouble.  I now present a few ultra-safe models that use LEGO bits as flames.  Thus, nobody gets hurt, LEGOs don’t melt, and nothing will trigger the smoke alarm.

LEGO menorah with 1x1 cylinder plate flames

My favorite is the one I made after the kid went to bed.  Used nine mini-figs with
hair removed.  The teeny, bald heads are the “oil” cups, and an official LEGO dragon flame is the “fire.”  As we only own three dragon flames, we can only use this menorah up through the second night of Hanukkah.  But it’s so worth it.

LEGO flames can be made of any flame-colored pieces: bricks, plates, cones, pips, cylinders and so forth. Older kids can figure out how to get the nine evenly spaced when they realize they don’t have a 17 -stud brick to support them.

Menorah rules come into play again, ’cause the flames can’t touch each other, lest they comingle and look like some sort of wacky offering to Ba’al.  This means more futzing with even-numbered studs and odd-numbered flames.  Not to mention symmetry and keeping the shammash unique and remembering the order in which the fake candles are fake lit.

LEGO menorah with cone flames

Some folks might associate LEGO menorahs with the gigantic, publicity-stunt creations courtesy of Chabad. I’m not a fan of missionaries, but even I have to admire the choice of building materials.

I prefer personal, kid-created hanukkiyot: humble table-top creations that help build together-time, Jewy time, and skills like spatial relationships, shape and size discrimination, fine motor, abstract to concrete correspondence, scale, counting, language and so on.

LEGO menorah with red 1x1 brick flames

But the biggest reason we do this at my house is because it’s fun.  That’s quite enough right there.

Here’s the list from my previous post, worth repeating:

Building a hanukkiyah is a great way to learn about the rules and customs:

1. How many flames?
2. What are the acceptable arrangements of the flames?
3. How to distinguish the shammash?
4. What order  to add the candles?
5. What order to light the candles?
6. Blessings for lighting?

Upside-down LEGO menorah with Lite Brite peg flames

Answers:

1. Nine: one for each of the eight nights, plus one for the shammash or servant candle.
2. Must be in a straight line, to avoid the appearance of a bonfire. Flames should be obviously separate from one another.  That means my Dad’s antique v-8 distributor cap is a no-no.  Bummer.
3. Shammash may be placed at a different height, or outside the line of the other candles.
4. Add candles from right to left.
5. Light candles from left to right (light the newest night’s candle first).
6. See this link at MyJewishLearning.com for blessings.

See also:
LEGO dreidels post
LEGO menorah with candles post
LEGO menorahs for Duplo Temple/Hanukkah Story post 

LEGO and Duplo Hanukkah menorahs

The intersection of Jewish holidays and LEGO again, but this time, with fire.

Last year, we made Duplo and LEGO menorahs for our Duplo Temple. Not Hanukkah menorahs, but the seven-branched menorah as per Exodus: the official holy lighting for the  Temple.  Ours was an invention born of necessity, as we could not find a teeny, seven-branched menorah to use in our LEGO minifig Story of Hanukkah.  (The bad guys had to knock down the menorah and the good guys had to pick it back up and light it.)

This year, we’re doing a Hanukkiyah: Hanukkah menorah.  Nine-branches.  And this year, we’re going to actually light it.

We built upside-down in order to take advantage of the handy tubes on the underside of Duplo and LEGO.  Duplo tubes are the perfect size to hold the fancy Hanukkah candles, and almost the perfect size to hold the ordinary kind.  The latter will need a smidge of foil or non-flammable clay in the bottom to hold the candle upright, or a drop of wax.  Typical Hanukkah candles drip like mad, so expect a good ol’ mess if you do this at home, and put a length of foil or a cookie sheet underneath the whole thing.

I predict weeping and teeth-gnashing if wax runoff engulfs our LEGOs, so truth be told, I shall have to blow the candles out before the wax gets to the gnashing-point.  I don’t have that mysterious anti-wax spray advertised on Judaica sites, and I’m not willing to make nine tiny bobeches to catch the drips.  The Duplo lamp will not be our primary Hanukkah menorah, so we will still be able to “publicize” the flames via the many other hanukkiyot in the room.  Publicizing a Jewish holiday from our windows on a busy street in Nashville is a bit like publicizing my website on the Internet.  A drop in an impossibly vast bucket.  A cry in the wilderness.  But, “so it is written, so shall it be done,” as Yul Brenner would say in a very different context.

The upside-down LEGO hanukkiyah has tubes, too, of course, but these are far too small for Hanukkah candles.  Birthday candles will fit, but we’re just using Lite Brite pegs to simulate actual fire.  Remember, red Battleship pegs will work, as will LEGO 1x cylinder bricks, cylinder plates (pips) and 1×1 bricks, but the tapered, translucent flamey-ness of Lite Brite beats them all.

Although I’d love to use olive oil with this, I wouldn’t dream of it unless I had those tiny glass jars that fit snugly in the tubes.

Building a hanukkiyah is a great way to learn about the rules and customs:

1. How many flames?
2. What are the acceptable arrangements of the flames?
3. How to distinguish the shammash?
4. What order  to add the candles?
5. What order to light the candles?
6. Blessings for lighting?

1. Nine: one for each of the eight nights, plus one for the shammash or servant candle.
2. Must be in a straight line, to avoid the appearance of a bonfire. Flames should be obviously separate from one another.  That means my Dad’s antique v-8 distributor cap is a no-no.  Bummer.
3. Shammash may be placed at a different height, or outside the line of the other candles.
4. Add candles from right to left.
5. Light candles from left to right (light the newest night’s candle first).
6. See this link at MyJewishLearning.com for blessings.

Morim.org (teacher site) Chanukah lesson plans for ages 5-7. Includes all the rules about making and lighting menorahs.

Love LEGO?  See my DIY LEGO Dreidels, here.

Squirt the Menorah

I live in Nashville, so I’m not so much in touch with the rest of the Hanukkah carnivalling world.  Is “Squirt the Menorah” a popular Hanukkah game?  The only Google hits seem to be my own.

I should say “Squirt the Hanukkiyah,” but it doesn’t have the right ring to it.  Menorah works fine in this case.

Now, usually, when we light Hanukkah candles, they stay lit until they go out by themselves.  It’s a no-no to blow them out or extinguish them in any way.  Squirt the Menorah involves shooting water pistols at a lit menorah, which sounds pretty treyf to me.  But we don’t play it during Hanukkah on the really real candles, the candles upon which we’ve said the commanded blessings and all.  No, we play Squirt the Menorah ahead of time, when it’s okay to extinquish the candles with a squirt gun.  Odd, but okay.

As usual, a discrepant event is a sure sign a teachable moment is at hand.  Sounds like a good time to bring up questions with the kiddies about why it is or is not cool to shpritz water on Hanukkah candles.*

Squirt the Menorah

Wet candles re-light just fine, by the way, but a fireplace lighter makes the job much easier than do matches.

If you need challenge levels, try different goals like shooting just the shammash, or shooting candles in “lighting” order (we light Hanukkah candles from left to right).  Otherwise, it’s fun just to squirt till they’re all out.

*See this animated video about lighting Hanukkah candles from MyJewishLearning.com. The tradition is to keep flames burning at least 30 minutes after lighting, but longer is better, as it gives more time to “publicize the miracle.”  Of course, we can’t extinguish any flame if it’s Shabbat.  Need more rules and reg?  Ask your spiritual advisor.  I’m not even a real Balabusta: I just play one on the Internet.

Safety: Please don’t try this with an oil Hanukkiyah. And do take all precautions when playing with fire, people.  Only adults should handle the lighter.