Dear Mordechai,
My neighbor’s arbah minim look a lot better than mine by the end of Sukkos. How do I keep mine looking fresh?
Wadded Foil
Dear Wadded,
Ask your wife.
Seriously. During the year, we buy our wives flowers, and then they have to figure out how to make the flowers last until the next time we buy them flowers.
But then Sukkos comes, we come in with our aravos, and we can’t get them to last a week. They should come with plant food.
Can I make my own plant food? What do plants eat? And in what part of the plant do I stick the food?
Somehow, over the course of Sukkos, your aravos contract some kind of arava leprosy. Everyone else in shul has nice, shiny aravos, and yours look like you couldn’t afford to spring for the leaves. It’s awkward when you hit your hoshanos on the ground a bunch of times and they still look better than your aravos.
But all guys have their own ideas of what to do, passed down from their fathers (never their mothers). One guy keeps it in his fridge, another guy puts it in the freezer, another guy uses a flower vase, because that seems to work for his wife, and another guy puts lemon juice on it so it doesn’t turn brown. I wrap mine in damp newspaper, put that in plastic and put it in the fridge.
“And does that work?”
No. I actually have no “control group” of minim that I can compare it to, to see if it at least does better than a set whose owner does not spend twenty minutes after shul trying to cram wet newspaper into a long skinny lulav plastic.
But every family has their own method, and they all work equally badly, so I say just do whatever is your minhag.
“But what about the guys with the shiny aravos? How do they do it?”
They cheat. There’s no halacha that says you can’t buy fresh aravos halfway through Chol HaMoed. They’re like a dollar. Or, if you buy a whole new esrog and lulav because your kid stubbed the old ones on the schach, those generally come with free aravos.
Another idea is to keep your minim in the sukkah. The rain will take care of it.
Dear Mordechai,
Is it just me or did my kindergartener bring home a lot of craft projects for Sukkos? Definitely more than she did for Yom Kippur.
Hanging Myself
Dear Hanging,
Well, it does say that your sukkah is supposed to have nice decorations. Ideally, this means paintings, but halacha also says that if it rains, you’re not allowed to bring your paintings inside on Yom Tov.
So teachers have their students make some for you, at a cost of about $5-$10 for something you didn’t ask for and that will only last until the first time you try to roll up your tarp. Yes, your other kids made the same projects last year, but they’re not supposed to last that long. You’re the one who keeps laminating them.
Or else they make ceiling decorations, such as chains. Chains all over your sukkah. That’s gangsta.
It also happens to be that sukkahs are notoriously easy to break into, so we don’t want expensive paintings in there. We want chains. This way, if someone breaks in, he’ll go, “I’ve got to get out of here! Colorful laminated chains! These people are gangsta.”
The chains are supposed to represent the Jewish people, I think. (Everything represents the Jewish people.) The Jewish people are a chain, and we’re colorful, we hang around near shiny things, and if we get wet, we’re done.