Miracles Every Day

As we lit the eighth candle last night, I talked with Littletree about the miracle of Channukah - about 2000 years ago, the temple was destroyed and the people needed specially prepared sacred oil to keep the sacred lamp burning. But in the ruins of the temple, all that remained was one little jar of oil; barely enough to last for one day, and it would take eight days to make more.
By a miracle, that small jar of oil lasted for eight days - long enough to make more, and to keep the flame burning.

For me, this is a true story; one that I've experienced in my real life. So many times I've been in the communal kitchens at Rainbow Gatherings, where communal vegetarian meals are prepared for sometimes up to 5,000 people twice daily.

The whole shebang is run by volunteers, without any structured leaders, workers or organisation. Everything from the collecting of donations, the writing of shopping lists, the shopping, the storage, the kitchen hygiene and the food preparation is done by self-appointed volunteers.

And sometimes we get into the kitchen to prepare food for hundreds or thousands of people, only to find that there's no oil left to cook with.
So I get an empty oil bottle, and I go around the whole festival to people's individual camp sites, and ask: can anyone donate a little oil from their personal food stash.

Even just a splash of oil, every little bit helps. Some people don't have oil, some people can just spare a little, some people give up half a bottle... but I always return to the kitchen with enough oil (or salt, or potatoes, or whatever) to make the meal for everyone to share.

It's a true miracle. When people work together and share as a community, everything is possible.

Chag Sameach.

Purim Sameach

It's Purim again! The classic example of every Jewish holiday which boils down to: They tried to kill us, we won, let's eat!  Remember all the fun from last year?

Since Purim fell mid-week, we didn't doing anything much on the day, but tonight night we're all going out dancing at Glo Dance, and then Saturday Littletree is going to a kids dress-up party down the street and there will be a Rocky-Horror party at my place - we'll all get dressed up as our fave characters, eat a feast, drink a lot of caipirinhas, and watch the movie :)

Meanwhile, here's a gorgeous photo of Littletree (then aged 3) and Butterfly, after a full day at the Tel Aviv Purim street party, 2006.

Hannukah

Hannukah overview…

I do love the doughnuts and the pretty candles ;)

First Candle

Guess what today is?

That’s right! I’m making sufganiot – jam-filled doughnuts. Which means it’s Channukah!

Home-made organic doughnuts from scratch:

Step 1: create a universe in which the following ingredients are available: Wheat flour, yeast, salt, sugar, cinnamon, milk, water, jam, oil.

Step 2: make up a basic yeast dough with a little milk and sugar, lets say, 4 cups flour, 2/3 cup sugar, a packet instant yeast, pinch salt, teaspoon cinnamon. mix it up and slowly pour in about a cup of warm milk and water (half-half). Keep adding in the milky water till you have a dough you can knead. Might need a tad more than a cup.

Step 3: knead the dough. (Baker’s secret: Make sure you taste some. Eating dough is vital to the process). Then cover it in a bowl and leave to rise for an hour or two (longer for colder temperatures).

Step 4: tear off and roll up small balls of the dough, flatten them into rounds, make a depression in the middle (almost as if you’re starting to make a bowl). Plop in a spoonful of jam – careful to get jam only in the centre of the dough bowl – and top it with another round of dough. Press the edges together carefully to make a nice seal (so jam wont leak out when cooking), roll the whole thing a little into a nice shape, and leave to rise more. Repeat till you run out of dough.

Step 5: Heat oil in a pot and deep fry the doughnuts till golden outside and cooked all the way through. Baker’s tip: don’t have a tantrum and throw boiling oil all over yourself.

Option: instead of a dollop of jam, put a square of chocolate in the middle.

Enjoy!

Shana Tovah

Littletree’s Shana Tovah greeting

Happy Jewish New Year :)

Littletree’s been brushing up on her Hebrew…

Homesick

We’re missing home; Littletree especially. She’s complaining pretty regularly that she wants to go home. She misses the food that she’s familiar with, she misses her friends, her own room…

Right now she’s lying on the bed next to me reeling off a list of all the things she misses so much from Australia. Tinned spaghetti, chicken nuggets, the fish and chip shop in Mullumbimby, chocolate-flake cereal, bread and nutella, flan, the porridge the Purple makes, Shakshuka that Purple makes, rice porridge, semolina, wafer biscuits, sausages… the list goes on and on.

I pointed out that most of those things we can get or make here (and funnily enough, most of those are things she rarely has anyway!) but I guess that’s not the point. What she really misses is being at home. She misses the comfort of having familiarity.

Me too. I’m happy to be traveling, and the place where we are staying is wonderful… but it’s not home. Funny, how after all those years of traveling, and not having any stable base or ties to anywhere, I’d find myself not only having a home, but feeling attached to it.

I miss having my own kitchen, and my own space. I miss Ariad and Purple. It’s strange to be queer in a country where homosexuality is illegal. I admit to taking advantage of my privilege of marriage, and being closeted; not mentioning aspects of my life that are very dear to me when we’re in public, or with strangers. It’s strange to be in a country where Israelis are banned. We have to be quiet about that too.

So, what can we do to overcome homesickness? We try to keep up our routine. We practice capoeira every day, we spend lots of time cuddling, Littletree watches her favourite DVDs, we talk with our friends and family on Skype, Littletree plays with the new kittens a lot.

 

And I remembered I have a secret stash of Shkedai Marak (Israeli soup crackers) that Littletree loves. I just pulled them out and she got all excited! Now I just have to make her some soup to go with them.

Tomorrow I’ll go to the big supermarket in the city that’s an hour away and try to get some comfort foods for Littletree, and we’ll plan some more fun activities and outings.

I’m sure we’ll be home before we know it!

Enough Matzah

It was still Passover when I arrived to Israel, so of course, there was an abundance of matzah around. Yay. I hate matzah; haven’t the Jewish people suffered enough?

Purple did succeed in making a damn fine tiramisu with matzah flour, and I do kind of like the matzah ball soup Purple’s mother makes.

Apparently, Littletree was hankering for some wafer biscuits, and her grandmother, aunt and cousin were all trying to explain why she can’t have any. They went through explaining the stories from the bible, and why we can’t eat any “Chametz” during Passover.

“But why” Littletree kept asking, “why can’t I have wafers?” Finally her cousin had enough and said to her “Just because! We do it because we always do it and we’ve been doing it for 3000 years!”

Littletree replied: “3000 years? I think it’s time to stop now!”

LOL The unhindered honesty of children :)

Anyway, it’s over now and I’m muchly enjoying a good fix of pita and hummous of the like you can’t get outside of the middle east. mmmm

Purim!

Yesterday we celebrated Purim, the most fun religious holiday ever. Everyone dresses up, gets intoxicated, and celebrates. The classic example of “they tried to kill us; we won; let’s eat!”

So we all got dressed up in costume and went out to the village dance

Littletree went as a gypsy-girl, complete with accessories her Savta sent from Israel (along with a big box of candies for mishloach manot.)

And Purple looked awesome in a get-up of mostly my clothes, along with a wig from Littletree’s dress-up bag. He certainly turned a few heads at the dance!

Of course we had a fantastic time dancing the night away :)

Happy Hannukah

*for some reason, this post didn’t go through last week when I sent it originally, so I’m re-posting*

A Short photo-essay of Hannukah 2010

As far as holidays go, it’s really not all that big of a deal, but it is nice to light the candles and sing a little song every evening, and to feel part of a tradition.

Christmukah Party

This weekend was the Christmas party in our village. It was a lovely picnic – lots of fun, everyone was hanging out in the park, singing carols, there was live music, and kids running everywhere

Santa arrived, on the village fire truck, of course.

The kids crowded around him while he gave out presents, and poor Littletree was the only child standing there politely with her hands out.

All the other kids were yelling and pushing and grabbing, while Littletree stood patiently waiting… and in the end, “Santa” passed her over about a dozen times giving little candy bags to the louder kids, and she missed out all together.

Littletree was so sad – it was the first time she’d ever seen a Santa :( She didn’t even really want the lollies, but it really sucked getting passed over like that when she was the only child not jumping around and pushing.

We sat down together for a hug, and she told me that he wasn’t the real Santa; just a man dressed up, and the real Santa is just something people believe in.

She got over it pretty quick, and went to play with her friends until it was sunset - time to light the Hannukah candles

I really enjoy the ritual of lighting the candles, and singing songs. 

 

We thought it was pretty funny to be lighting Hannukah candles at a Christmas party, but no one else seemed to know what it was. The Hannukiah did draw some interested guests though

Merry Non-Specific Holidays to everyone!

Sufganiot

Last night was the first candle lighting for Hannukah, so of course we lit candles and sang songs, but the most important part of the Hannukah tradition is Sufganiot - jelly doughnuts!

Naturally, I make my own. From organic, whole flour, biodynamic butter, unrefined sugar and raw milk of course ;)

Littletree and I had lots of fun making them;

First make the dough, let it rise and then roll it out:

Then put jam in the middle (we did half with raspberry jam and half with nutella)

Stick two halves together and shape them

Then let them rise, and finally; cook them!

Sequoia was playing when I finished cooking them all, and check out the look on her face when I called her over to see the finished product:

Of course, Littletree had the most important job of all; taste testing!

She couldn't give a final verdict, since her mouth was so full ;)

YUM!

Candles

This week was the final meet up of our local home school group for the year, and we had a candle-making workshop.

There's a couple who set up a candle-making stand at the markets, and we thought it would be a nice idea to get them to come to do candle-making at the homeschool group. It turned out that the couple are the caretakers who live at the hall where we have our meet ups!

So they set up their tables and wax pots, and we had a huge turn out of families arriving from all over the shire and beyond to make candles.

The process was making tapers by dipping a wick successively in different coloured pots of melted wax.

Then once the taper is big enough (or in most cases, too big), the people who ran the workshop would slice and shape them into amazing designs.

It was a load of fun - I even made two of my own.

Purple joked that we should make 44, as Hannukah is coming up next week!

Here's Littletree with her finished creation:

Oh Christmas Tree

Littletree has spent most of her life either in third world countries or in non- Christian countries, so until now, the concept of Christmas has been mostly unknown to her.

Of course, now that we live in a Western country, and there's tinsel and pictures of Santa Claus pretty much everywhere, she's cottoned on. Last year we avoided the whole idea by skipping off in December to a rainbow gathering, but this year, she's been talking to other kids, and she's all excited about the idea of "going to Christmas".

I have mixed feelings about it. First of all, since her father is Jewish, I'm an Animist and Littletree herself has announced that she's Hindu, we don't really have much to do with Christian holidays. The over-commercialised aspect of Christmas rubs me entirely the wrong way, not to mention the bastardisation of pagan holidays and old European traditions.

Still, Littletree is excited about Christmas. I asked her what she thinks it is and she said "pretty shiny tinsel, Christmas trees and Santa" I asked her what Santa is and she said, "he's that old Christmas guy with red clothes."

Littletree doesn't have any concept of Santa coming and giving presents in the night (an idea I wouldn't perpetuate anyway), or even of expecting presents for Christmas. She merely wants to have tinsel and a tree to decorate in the house.

I thought we could decorate a tree in the garden, but what with us not having any smallish, reachable trees near our house, and the torrents of rain we've been getting, I bought her a little plastic Christmas tree in the dollar shop, and some tinsel and baubles from the op shop.

She LOVES it. 

Littletree spent ages decorating the tree, and putting baubles up around the whole house. I thought the tree would be put on a shelf in the corner, but Littletree has been playing with it constantly; she gets it down and sets it up in the middle of the living room all the time :)

Of course, I got a book from the library about traditions and holidays from cultures around the world so we can learn about Christmas and all the variations. We'll talk about the religious Christian aspect, as well and the old European traditions, and the pagan basis for things. We'll talk about the secular aspects of Christmas and how the religious Jews view the holiday, (the extreme of whom reserve the day for tearing the whole year's supply of toilet paper!) and solstice, Diwali, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, etc.