The Funny Part of the Seder

Okay. So I am usually immaculately well organized around these important events. I know well in advance precisely who is coming; I have the silver polished; I have the linens ironed. Generally the soup is made and froze at least a month in advance. The shopping is done in advance and whatever else can be done, is done. Boy this year...not even close. I mucked up inviting people, although it worked out in the end since clearly I needed to have less than my usual 20 or so. This year we were just a comfortable, intimate 1o. The soup I managed to do before the fact. But the day before, which I did take off from work, I intended to bake the flourless chocolate cake. I called tech support for my printer and 5 hours on the telephone later, I had the promise of a new printer but nothing else and definitely no chocolate cake. I did manage, before calling tech support in India, to start the onions sauteing for the chopped liver. My dad has always made it, and more. Now, it is all he can do and it takes a long time and makes a big mess. So I try to make the parts ahead and he "chops" on the day of; first thing so it is out of the way. Meanwhile I managed to obsess about the ritual items so much on the day of that I forgot to put silverware on the table! I put wine instead of water in Miriam's cup, etc. All through the day I thought, oh, I'm doing fine. Then I would realize some crucial item I had forgotten. Like Charoset. Good grief, forgot all about it! Whipped up my two versions. I didn't feel like using the haggadot we had that were very long so I picked up a bunch of the old Maxwell House ones to use (some of you will remember those, never should have been reprinted!). It is unbelievably old fashioned. Full of "he" and "thee" and "thine" and actual whole sentences and paragraphs that nobody could read aloud because they made no actual sense. I couldn't stop laughing. And the Cantor took to using the sonorous voice you imagine of a deity, speaking in God's voice. And even the teenagers were laughing. Until Cantor began to lose his voice because he is allergic to cats, a fact we forget about all the time. We only had one young child so she got to find the afikomen. Jacob pretended to search too and declared that he should get money too because he "came in second". All in all we had a pretty nice time, with people we love, and a pretty funny time. I will always think of this seder as the coming in second seder because I was so not together and of course I have very high expectations. But laughter is a better second place prize than anything.