Feelin’ Funny: Mordechai Schmutter

Of all the industry trade shows out there, the only one that I cover, religiously, is Kosherfest.  And the reason is simple: There’s food.

A while back, I wrote an article about having teenagers in your house (I advised against).  But you can’t help it.  They keep getting in.  They started off as these cute, little, helpless creatures who napped at random times of the day and got fussy for reasons they did not share with you and made huge, explained messes without warning, and you let them live with you, but now they’re big, helpless creatures who nap at random times of the day and get fussy for reasons they don’t share with you and make huge, explained messes without warning.  And they know where you hide your spare key. 

I enjoy complaining about Daylight Saving Time as much as the next guy, but this new law that the government is trying to pass is not the way to deal with it.  Complaining about is the way to deal with it.  Like our fathers and their fathers before them, all the way back to sometime after they had real things to complain about.

So we have two parakeets. 

Mind you, we don’t own the parakeets.  We’re hosting them for yom tov.  We have parakeets the same way we’re having my in-laws.  They make noise, hog the newspaper, and I have to keep putting out food.

So we’ve had birds in our house for two weeks now.  And we all have holes in our fingers.

(NOTE: This article was written shortly after Sukkos.)

From time to time, I run a yom tov article that is really not written for you, apparently – it’s just a way of recording my family’s apparent minhagim.  Minhagim are treasured traditions, handed down from generation to generation as a way of keeping our mesorah alive, but the problem is that for the most part, handing things down in this way is like playing a game of telephone, where, over the years, some customs get added, muddled, or taken out.