The summer’s end is always bitter sweet, but this one ended pretty much as well as I’d have liked – starting with getting locked out of our house (okay, that part wasn’t so great), walking a mile to pick up the set of spare keys in some really glorious weather, stumbling across a free Jazz festival and sitting on the grass listening to some great music for an hour, and spending a last hurrah warm summer evening eating dinner with family outside under the stars.

Heading over to Joe and Susan’s house tonight – Joe is technically my dad’s first cousin, and while I did grow up calling him Uncle Joey, that had to stop after watching years of Full House – I tried to explain to Devon what the Jewish holiday of Sukkot is like. While we’ve hit many of the major holidays several times, somehow we hadn’t made it to a Sukkot dinner, and I was excited to share the tradition. “Well, it’s sort of a Jewish harvest holiday where we’ll be tailgating on the porch under a hut.” I can see the great rabbi’s rolling over in their graves at that. Devon looked at me skeptically. “And there will be chili!” I proclaimed!

Aside from the celebration of fall, and the harvest, Sukkot is a week long commemoration of the Israelites in pilgrimage and exile. The Sukkah is an outdoor hut that is built to remind us of the fragile nature of exile dwellings, the joy that can be had with simplicity, and we eat outside (and some sleep outside) in the hut each night of the seven days. There is great symbolism represented in the lulav (a frond of the date palm, willow and myrtle branches) and the etrog (a yellow citron), which are sort of shaken about after waiting for three stars to appear in the sky. It’s tradition to have friends and family gathered each night of Sukkot in the sukkah, and because we don’t actually have one at home, I was happy to head out to Hingham for this shindig – Sukkot is one of my favorite holidays!

Being a Saturday, it was also the end of the sabbath, and the beginning of the new week, so in addition to Sukkot blessings, we also performed the Havdalah ritual – ending the sabbath with blessings over the wine, the lighting of a traditional many-wicked candle, the smelling of spices, and finally extinguishing the candle in the wine.

Tonight marked a nice transition into fall, and I’m looking forward to the adventures and excitement that this season holds. Happy Sukkot, and happy Fall everyone!