Our Passover dishes are yellow flowers with lots of green, so we definitely embraced that for the evening's event:
We had to set-up just about every table we owned, including taking the table from the outside and bringing it in. We borrowed chairs from my in-laws, as well a high-chair from my parents to make sure that we had enough resources for everyone. Thankfully we were also able to get a whole additional set of silverware and kosher them before the holiday.
We also had to buy an additional 4 place settings of plain white dishes- our place setting is only for 12 people, and we had 16 adults. We served the egg soup on the table, so when people sat down the first thing they had was the egg soup. I don't know how many people serve this as part of their meal, but it's been a tradition in my family for ever. It's a hardboiled egg soup with salt water. I totally love it, and it turned out that several of the kids loved it too. Simple, yummy, and definitely traditional to start with an egg.
For the kids I used colorful napkins which I already had, and bought plastic eco-friendly plates in the right colors at Big Lots. I had just enough kids silverware to make it work out, and I think that all the parents appreciated not having to worry about what there kids were going to do with breakables. In the corner is our seder plate, which we bought at Target a few years ago. It's heavy, and goes with everything, and generally I like it. However, I'm sure over the year's I'll get the opportunity to buy something new.
Sorry this picture isn't the best, but it's what I took the night before we had everyone over. We set-up the entrance breakfast bar with wine glasses of all sizes/shapes. Since the event was on Tuesday night I didn't want to make anyone feel like they had to drink to much- if you look closely you can also see the small dixie cups that I got for kids and adults alike. I also had a small bowl set-out in case anyone wanted to take on the challenge of drinking full glasses, as is tradition. Our audience was really young, so no one drank much if any of the juice I bought. I even bought a few sparkling juices for myself, but was so busy hosting that I didn't drink any of them!
You can also see that inside some of the wine glasses are the plague puppets that we have. I assigned each one of the adults a plague. While it was a good idea, in the actual telling of the story the adults needed more direction about what to do/how to participate. Next year I'll spell it out on a little card, or maybe give the adults all the plague items to handle themselves. You can also see our Haggadah from this year. You can take a look at it in more detail. I took a lot from Haggadot.com, as well as the URJ. The graphic images are from the Evite that I used, and something I found online- probably not for distribution, so don't try to sell my haggadah!
I gave each kid a basket. Here's what was inside:
We had the basket, a baby Moses, some frogs, a Little People Farm animal, some sort of bug (finding just locusts was to hard!), a wild beast, some flies (for lice), some white craft balls (hail), red stickers (boils). I had two pairs of sunglasses for darkness and a small bottle of red food dye for blood. I didn't get a pair of glasses for every kid. Honestly, while I'm glad I did it, it was quite the expense!
I put the really tiny items in a plastic ziplock bag so the kids didn't throw them around to early. I think they really enjoyed them- especially the baby dolls. Some of the kids took them home, others didn't. I had expected them to take them as sort of gifts from the evening, but since we were done with them earlier in the evening, I don't think they thought about it. If I was going to do it again I would still give the kids the baskets with the baby dolls, but I would hold on to the plague items and give those to the parent assigned to each plague. That way the parents could give the items to the kids, and really interact a bit more. At the end of the day, they really went off well. It was great when we got to the plagues watching all the kids find their items and clutch them and show them off. The boil stickers were a HUGE hit too!
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| Relaxing with the youngest in the group, 10 weeks old! |
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| Lots of Passover story books, in addition to our Haggadah. We set-up the front room with lots of access. You can also see a child in the far back, in front of the coloring table we had set-up. |
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| Baby Moses also loves cats! |
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| Almost the whole group. I did this as a NEXT shabbat project, and they helped fund my kosher meat. |
Of course, Passover isn't over yet. We have a fun sorta seder coming up on Saturday, and of course we're Counting the Omer! I promise to show pictures of my Omer counting fun next week.
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