Planning for Purim

This year Purim falls on March 9th. Have you ever celebrated Purim with your children? It's the beautiful story of Esther and is great fun to observe! At our house, Purim is much anticipated all through the winter months.

Most of the time we celebrate with just our family, although we have had a party with our school group before and with a couple of little girls from our church last year. First, it's essential to have some dress up clothes so Esther can look just like a queen. You'll need a Haman, a King, and a Mordecai, so you'll need some sort of dress up clothes to differentiate between them. It might be fun to make and decorate a crown for each person - there is a pattern here. Or you might enjoy making masks.

If you don't have enough people, you might make puppets out of paper or socks or use these paper dolls (or some homemade ones, although these are especially nice and can be used for all sorts of different occasions) glued onto popsicle sticks for handles. Once we made a nice puppet stage with a box turned on the side and decorated - it even had "footlights", which was a string of clear Christmas lights!

Since you boo, hiss, and make noise every time Haman's name is mentioned in the story, you might want to make noise-makers with 2 paper plates, decorated and stapled together with some dried beans in the middle and some ribbons around the edges. Or you can buy real groggers at Judaism.com. You might like to prepare a "Pin the Crown on Esther" or "Pin the Hat on Haman" game, too.

Then you'll need the story of Esther, either straight from the Bible, which is my preference, or from a good Bible story book. You'll need to read it ahead of time so you can decide how long you want the story to be, perhaps highlighting the parts your narrator will use.

Finally, you'll want to make Hamantashen, the traditional Purim cookie. I usually use my favorite sugar cookie dough and jam, but here's a recipe and an illustration of how to fold the cookie (be sure to refrigerate the dough for at least an hour before rolling out a portion at a time). Here's another recipe that sounds great - I might try this one myself! It's traditional to make enough cookies to give to neighbors and friends, along with fruit or other goodies.

I have two books, which I like to use to celebrate Jewish feasts. The first one is Jewish Family Celebrations by Arlene Rossen Cardozo. It does include Purim. The second one is Celebrate the Feasts by Martha Zimmerman and is a Christian book which explains simple Christian ways to celebrate Jewish feasts (Purim is not included in this book, but all other Jewish feasts are). Both books include recipes and ideas for celebrations.

Purim can be as elaborate or as simple as you want to make it. Why not give it a try this year?