Purim came and went, with no pinball tournament

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Posters who have been around a while, and read my pinball posts might remember that there’s a Jewish holiday which we always celebrate by hosting a megillah reading and pinball tournament. With lots of food, and as is customary (and, in fact, commanded), for the holiday, lots of alcohol.

Well, the holiday came and went last week, and instead, we participated in our synagogue’s online party, and unplugged all the pins for the evening as a sign of mourning.

It’s been years since we didn’t have a Purim party, and even longer since I didn’t make shlach manos for friends. I didn’t make a single one this year. I baked hamantashen for my brother, stepfather, and for us, but didn’t make any general shlach manos. We did hand out sack lunches to homeless people, but that was our only traditional Purim observation.

This is my favorite holiday. It’s for me like canceling Christmas and Halloween in the same year.

It’s just kind of hitting me now. I felt like expressing my disappointment.

I realize that if the worst things the plague has done to me are caused me to miss seeing my brother, and not get to have my Purim party, I’m getting off easy. No one close to me has died, I haven’t caught it (yet), my son has been in school about 90% of the year, DH has been employed, I’ve been at reduced employment, but we had lots of savings, and we haven’t run through them, because we’ve been conservative-- or at least, have been since about last May, when it dawned on us that this could go on more than a year.

We had one thing bad happen to us, but it wasn’t a disaster, and was only tangentially related to COVID.

I’m still very disappointed in the moment.

I think when we reach herd immunity with the vaccines, and the Universal Precautions Redux are called off, we will have a special pinball tournament. Maybe even with lots of booze. Definitely with lots of food-- maybe even with hamantashen, no matter when it happens.

2

Until last March, the last Friday night of every month was Pinball Happy Hour at our house. It is sorely missed.

3

I comfort myself with the memory that Purim last year was just about a week before the US was hit hard, and all the closures began. We did get the party in last year, and the shlach manos, and everything.

The more I think about it, the more I think a post-plague tournament sounds good.

I think we’ll also make it a “pack sack lunches” party, and then I can take them around the next day.

I used to keep sack lunches in my car all the time, and give them out to homeless people when I saw them panhandling, but in the last year, except for a few “regulars,” who I worried maybe depended on my (and last Yom Kippur, and Purim), I haven’t been giving them out.

I buy non-perishables in bulk, so the lunches cost me about $1.25 each, albeit, the ones I’ve been giving the regulars in the last year have been a little more, because they’ve also had a meal bar/power bar type thing in them, as well as a disposable mask, because I figure they probably aren’t getting as much money as before.

I used to go downtown on the weekends, and chat with people when I handed stuff out, but not this last year.

4

Alas, as a result of the religious crap in my parents’ and grandparents generation I have never participated in Purim. Which makes me sad. Every passing year I wish more and more I could do so, but this year was not the year.

@RivkahChaya, it doesn’t matter if your loss of a holiday is a huge thing or a small thing in the larger scheme of things - it is still your loss. Yet another thing to grieve in this year of so much grief. Even those of us lightly touched have still been touched and should still mourn what we have lost, whether great or small.

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Thanks.

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Covid has caught everyone off guard. Of course, some have had big losses and a lot of big events have been cancelled. However, it often surprises me that the things one misses the most are sometimes surprisingly humdrum or routine. I’m sorry for your loss, but next time around I am sure you will appreciate it yet more.

7

Oh, hamantashen! My maternal grandfather and my four uncles were bakers* (later caterers), and made the world’s most delicious hamantashen. They didn’t use the cookie-like dough that’s common today, but a thin dough that was almost strudel-like. I wish I could find that kind today.

*My mom grew up in a bakery, yet was actually skinny. Imagine that!

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My dough isn’t what I’d call “strudel-like,” but it is a yeast dough. I know only one other person who uses yeast dough, and he uses challah dough-- outside of my family, or my family’s region, that is. When I visited the part of Slovakia where my mother’s family had lived in for a long time, and met some people who were still there (or, back there-- I’m not really clear on just how they survived the war there, but they had a subsistence farm in a kind of remote location), I found out it was pretty common to the area.

That part of your family didn’t happen to be from Slovakia or Hungary, by any chance? My mother called the dough for hamantashen “kolace [KO-lah-chey]” dough, because “kolace” is a Slovak word that just means “pastry (as a collective noun-- ‘that bakery has great pastry.’” It has cognates in Czech and Polish, and I think Serbo-Croatian. Not sure about Hungarian; it isn’t a Slavic language, but does have Slovak and Russian loan words-- and lots and lots of Polish, Czech and Slovak Jews. For some reason, if was a safe place during WWII.

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My mom’s family was from either Poland or Russia, depending on who won the most recent war.