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Post by savtele on Dec 12, 2016 1:10:38 GMT -5
What’s on your mind – how to make kugel? This week’s Torah reading? Life goals? Prayer? We are all engaged in weight loss/weight maintenance journeys and we are all Jewish or at least interested in Judaism. We like to eat, we like to discuss. It is our goal here to provide each other support on our journeys, to share experiences, to call on our rich cultural heritage and texts, and to help each other grow spiritually.
Some of us take weekly turns starting the thread:
Angelika
Holly
Lee
Louise
Lynne
Peachy
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Post by savtele on Dec 12, 2016 1:26:24 GMT -5
Boker Tov All! I'm enjoying the discussion. I am particularly taken by the families that seem to be able to split the celebrations evenly! (A friend of mine does Christmas one year, Hanukkah the next), and I am very impressed with the LDS woman who was able to support her daughters' determination to live Jewish!
Continuing with the juxtaposition of the holidays: somebody mentioned "cookies are Christmas!" Ok, I agree - SOME cookies are Christmas - others surely are generic? And, with other foods of course, latkas are Hanukkah, as are rugelach (but they are not limited to wintertime) and gingersnaps, in my mind will always be Hanukkah - my Oma made them every year. But gingerbread men are quintessentially Christmas.
There is this white chocolate bark, with crushed peppermint candycanes pressed into it, that to me is irresistibly Christmas (and you cannot get them any other time of year) They are my guilty Christmas pleasure!
Do you have a guilty Christmas food pleasure?
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Post by louise on Dec 12, 2016 8:15:56 GMT -5
And Hershey's makes white chocolate kisses with peppermint at this time of year too. I love caramel corn. Definitely not a specifically Christmas food but at this time of year there always seems to be a tin at the office with 3 kinds of popcorn - I don't have anything against the plain or the cheese, but I will always go for that third one. I've been known to have a glass of eggnog in the season too - especially if it's homemade.
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lee058
This space for rent
Posts: 23,285 
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Post by lee058 on Dec 12, 2016 8:30:43 GMT -5
Good morning everybody. Hope you are all well. It's raining here in VA, but I'm glad it's warm enough that it isn't snowing!!! I hate cold weather, as I have mentioned before (!!). Later this week, it's supposed to get down to the teens, brrrrrrrrrrr and yuck. DS and I are planning on clearing out the garage this afternoon so I can put the car in there.
Re Christmas sweets: I love dark chocolate bark with peppermint, and pfferneussen cookies (the spelling may be off but it's fairly close to that). They are tiny spicy cookies that are only available this time of year. I do not like white chocolate, even though it looks festive.
Have a peaceful day, Lee
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Post by happysavta on Dec 12, 2016 13:09:05 GMT -5
As a child, my family didn't partake in America's obsession with Christmas in any way. It didn't enter our house. And when I was 19, I left for Israel and stayed 10 years. So, I never developed any tie to any Christmas food at all. I knew Christian families baked elaborate Christmas cookies and put up a Christmas tree with ornaments and tinsel and bought presents. So we very deliberately excluded cookies from the menu, banned tinsel and ornaments and scorned the nefarious "Chanukah bush", and frowned on present exchanges.
But it has crept in anyway. Christmas is too alluring, too appealing, too overwhelming. You want to be part of all the good-will and kindness, so you donate to the Salvation Army, you guiltily enjoy the amazing music of the carols, you want to buy something too and you shop too, you drive around and look at the beautiful light displays on homes and roofs. Let me tell you, it's much easier to be Jewish in Israel than in America. As Christmas has become more and more secular, and less and less religious, with every passing year, we are more drawn into it. I don't know if that's good or bad. I just know it's part of being a Jew in an American melting pot.
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Post by louise on Dec 12, 2016 14:32:01 GMT -5
Christmas is a great time of year to buy myself slippers - best selection of the year!
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Post by gazelle18 on Dec 12, 2016 15:34:57 GMT -5
Anyone had a piece of something called a bouche Noel? I think it's French and it's a Christmas thing and it's great.
In the song that goes "we wish you a merry Christmas...." they talk about something called figgy pudding. I have asked many gentiles what that is and no one knows!!
Oh and the big thing down here in NOLA is the "king cake." Starting at xmas and going thru Mahdi gras. Also of French derivation, and wuite amazing. It features a hidden plastic baby, and the person who gets the baby in their piece has to bring the next king cake. Baby is the baby Jesus.
Ok now I'm hungry!!!
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Post by louise on Dec 12, 2016 17:57:18 GMT -5
I just read that Israel's Health Minister has asked that people refrain from eating sufganiyot - like that's goin to happen!
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Post by hollygail on Dec 12, 2016 18:09:59 GMT -5
I don't know if it's my "guilty" Christmas food pleasure, but I LOVE CHRISTMAS COOKIES. There. I said it. I probably told you that DH works with a woman who makes them every year and gives baskets of them (sometimes cookie tins of 'em) to everyone she works with. I decided not to have any pointy things this week because he's bringing them home on Friday...
I go through the assortment and separate into the ones I want and everything else. Then I have to go through the first category to determine what I'm willing to share with DH. (yes, WILLING to) She always has a very good selection of chocolate: one has some kind of gooey inside, one is similar to a regular chocolate chip cookie, there's at least one kind of brownie, yes she makes the chocolate peppermint thing Angelika, to name only what I can remember from previous years. I'll fill you all in on Friday...
I went to another funeral this morning. Heart-wrenching. The father of a former student who became bat mitzvah at the end of 1994 while her mother was going through chemo. The mother died a few months later. He was buried next to her (he did remarry a few years later, and apparently I met her at least once because she recognized me and came over for a hug, thanking me for coming; she called me by name!). After the burial and the recessional (is that the term? the guests make two lines for the mourners to walk between), I visited the wife's grave. That's when I lost it. Cried and cried. One of the employees found me a couple of stones (I had asked where I could look for some); I could barely thank him through my sobs. The daughter whose bat mitzvah I mentioned recognized me (she hadn't seen me since she was about 13 or so), and her younger brother (who hadn't been a student of mine) said I looked familiar when I spoke with him. I ran into the rabbi from back when the kids were actually children (he retired from somewhere in the Southeast and came back to San Diego a few years ago; he's working in a hospital doing hospice work, something I can really see him doing a great job with).
And I see I'm blathering. So I must be finished... at least for now.
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Post by happysavta on Dec 12, 2016 20:17:52 GMT -5
What was it about this particular death or this particular funeral that made you so emotional? I think people in general tend to be very sensitive to loss at this time of year.
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Post by hollygail on Dec 13, 2016 0:22:16 GMT -5
Last May or June, I lost a 22-year-old former bar mitzvah student to heroin. In early fall, I went to another funeral of a 30-something woman (cantorial soloist) who died of complications from surgery. Later in the fall, I lost a former adult education student with whom I'd become good friends. This is #4 in something like 6 (or so) months. It's possible that it's just plain too much death so close to me. Or it's possible that this man was such a very, very, very NICE human being. Or that I knew him for around 25 years. Or that I was around when his (first) wife died (yes, he remarried). Or that his 30-something-year-old daughter (my former student) and son are now orphans.
Who knows. It just really hit me very hard.
I got a call later in the afternoon that the son and daughter were going to the home of another teacher I know through the network of teachers, so I went, and wound up leading ma-ariv so the man's brother and daughter and son could say kaddish. Both his brother and his daughter are leaving for home in the morning. I got the son's phone number and promised his sister I'd check on him from time to time since he will have zero family around (there's some sort of estrangement between him and his step-mother and her three sons from her previous marriage).
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