What the Jewish Harvest Festival of Sukkot means for Jewish families and friends, businesses and customers, and buyers and sellers of sukkoth tee-shirts

Angela Lansbury in a sukkah at a home in the UK. It is in a back garden.

Oct 2020. Angela Lansbury in a sukkah in London in a back garden.

UK

Today Monday 10th October 2022 and tomorrow Tuesday 11th October 2022, some Jewish businesses in London, England are closed for Sukkot. For two days. In the UK orthodox Jewish families celebrate for two days, on festivals which are only one day in Israel, in order to be sure to be celebrating at the same time as Israel even if the date in Isreal spans two days elsewhere. If your estate agent (Americans say realtor) in London, England, is closed, don't worry, read the signs. They are probably opening again on Wednesday.

 You might be invited to a neighbour's sukkos, or to one built in a synagogue. 

What is the sukkos (temporary building) celebrating sukkot (the festival). I typed restival, a happy typo.

Israel

In Israel, you can see the little huts hung with fruit on balconies of blocks of flats in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and elsewhere.   The rule is that you can build it only if you can see the sky, so on a penthouse would be ok, not indoors nor a covered area and bad luck if your balcony has another directly above it.

Jerusalem and Tel Aviv also have festivities such as the parade in Jerusalem called the Jerusalem march.

A sukkah is built outdoors by Jews, albeit leaning against the house wall. 

However, the Samaritans build a sukkah indoors, because they had to do so under Byzantine persecution and have kept up the practice.

Samaritan sukkah indoors. Photo from Wikipedia.

I like the way the Samaritan sukkah has the fruit arranged in concentric circles of different colours.

India

When I was in India I saw a hut built in the middle of  a field. My driver-guide said it was for the workers to guard the crops of the harvest.

In London I have been in three different sukkas.

You are supposed to eat all your meals in the sukkah. Just pray that it doesn't rain.

You can buy the components for building one online.

If you get invited to a meal or an event in a sukkah, you could wear an oufit featuring fruit.

You can buy Sukkoth tee shirts and dresses online from Red bubble and others, for about twenty dollars, plus postage, and upwards. Look out for bargains in the sales after the festival is over. 

I bought a shirt with grapes. You find items with grape themes in shops attached to wineries. Items for sukkoth might be in Jewish museums of Jewish souvenir shops.

Angela Lansbury in grape theme shirt.

Useful blogs, websites, videos

Info on the festival

ISRAEL

https://www.touristisrael.com/things-to-do-for-sukkot-on-israel/2615/#:~:text=The%20first%20and%20last%20days,to%20celebrate%20with%20their%20families.

https://www.touristisrael.com/sukkot-in-jerusalem/8164/

https://www.touristisrael.com/jerusalem-march/8176/

UK

https://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-jewish-harvest-festival-of-sukkah.html?m=0

Buying a sukkah

https://sukkahmart.co.uk/

https://www.alephbeta.org/playlist/sukkot-meaning-why-we-celebrate?utm_source=facebook

Clothes

Redbubble.com online shop, tee-shirts for Sukkoth

Redbubble.com shop

Useful Websites

Sukkot tee shirts

https://www.redbubble.com/shop/sukkot+womens-clothing

https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Funny-Happy-Sukkot-Day-Jewish-Holiday-by-SkyCloudBlue/94492124.IJ6L0.XYZ

Please share links to your favourite blog posts.

Portuguese Words On Portuguese Wine Labels and Wine Words You Should Know

Colheita means vintage. (It's actually the Portuguese word for harvest. So this was the 1976 harvest.)

Portuguese - English
branco - white
colheita - vintage or harvest
de - of
doce - sweet
maduro - mature or aged
mesa - table (I remember: Don't make a mess on the table.)
quinta - farm, estate or winery
seco - dry
tinto - red (Think of tinted red.)
verde - green or young
vinho - wine
vinhos - wines
vinho de calidad - wine of quality
vinho de mesa - table wine

English - Portuguese
aged or mature - maduro
dry - seco
farm, estate or winery - quinta
green - verde
harbest or vintage - colheita
of - de
red - tinto
sweet - doce
table - mesa (I remember: This table is in a mess.)
table wine - vinho de mesa
vintage or harvest - colheita
white - branco
wine - vinho
wines - vinhos
winery, estate or farm - quinta
wine of quality - vinho de calidad
young (wine) - verde (literally green)

Useful Websites
https://catavino.net/portuguese-wine-label/ (Reading a wine label. Wine tours of Spain and Portugal.)

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

Moon cakes and mid-autumn harvest festivals: Jewish Sukkoth and Indian Huts

Over breakfast, the morning after my trip to a Toastmasters meeting on the theme of the Moon Festival, we could see the orange lanterns around the swimming pool in Singapore had gone.

However, memories of the mooncake discussions about the moon festival of previous days lingered in our minds. We sat eating Scottish porridge oats, not a Chinese, Malay or Singaporean or Asian porridge savoury, not the Scottish way with salt, but the English way sweetened with sugar. Our own family version features the addition of Canadian maple syrup. The British are famous for their fondness for sweet foods, with a high per capita consumption of sugar and confectionary.

Harvest Festival at School in England
I remember from schooldays in London, England, how we would see the school hall decorated with greenery, and a small mountain of tainted food and fresh food to the right of the hall platform. At one time the food would have been distributed back to the children, so that the poorest families received food, in effect, from the richer families. Nowadays, more often the food is sent to homes for the elderly and poor and to charities for the homeless. To me this was an English tradition, and a Christian tradition.

Sukkos for Sukkot Festival
Later I visited a synagogue in London and saw the sukkos, the autumn harvest festival where a three sided hut is constructed from tree branches and plants. it might be tied with raffia. It is often open fronted with three sides with the fourth sides against or formed by the outside wall of a home. In the nineteen sixties, seventies and eighties, in London, the religious Jews would build a sukkos in their back garden. Non-religious friends might be invited to share the ceremony.

In the late nineteen nineties or the 21st century I was invited to a multi-faith ceremony in a Sukkos built at the back of a Liberal synagogue. The purpose was to share the tradition with increasingly secular families who no longer bothered to build a sucks at home. Also to show the Sukkos to the members of the Methodist church alongside (the church and synagogue often entertaining each others members).

A Sukkos for a private home would be small. In the large communal size Sukkos the colourful fruits hung from the roof which was partly open to the sky. The ceremony included an explanation of the origin of the festival, songs and prayers, and ended with plates of fruits passed around and general conviviality and mingling.

At the end of the festival, the rule is, you must dismantle the construction entirely. A new one must be built each year. (This reminds me of the Seder night, passover, when the spring harvest requires all the old food to be discarded, because it might be infected with the mould causing St Vitus' dance, before the new harvest is brought back to be stored. In the Seder festival you have a new dining set.)

Indian
I was astonished when I went to India to see that huts for the harvest workers were in the middle of the field (guarding the harvest against robbers at night), reminiscent of biblical times in the Far East. Suddenly the Jewish festival, with its construction of a hut from fronds, tacked onto a brick building in a back yard, which had all been a puzzle to me, made perfect sense. it echoed the old days when your food for the next year was brought back from a field where the family or a servant or employee was camped out overnight in a makeshift DIY temporary hut.

As we sat over breakfast, mulling over these harvest festival memories and thoughts, I reflected that these traditions all reflected harvest and autumn festivals.

Singapore
"But Singapore doesn't have autumn, nor four seasons, nor harvests," pointed out a member of my family. "The tradition comes from China."

Maybe the harvest festivals of the Christian, Jewish, Chinese and Indian cultures are not connected. But I used to have trouble remembering whether the Jewish Sukkos and the Chinese moon festival are in the spring or autumn. Now with this mental connection, it's very clear to me and easy to remember.


Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

Moon cakes and mid-autumn harvest festivals: Jewish Sukkoth and Indian Huts

Over breakfast, the morning after my trip to a Toastmasters meeting on the theme of the Moon Festival, we could see the orange lanterns around the swimming pool in Singapore had gone.

However, memories of the mooncake discussions about the moon festival of previous days lingered in our minds. We sat eating Scottish porridge oats, not a Chinese, Malay or Singaporean or Asian porridge savoury, not the Scottish way with salt, but the English way sweetened with sugar. Our own family version features the addition of Canadian maple syrup. The British are famous for their fondness for sweet foods, with a high per capita consumption of sugar and confectionary.

Harvest Festival at School in England
I remember from schooldays in London, England, how we would see the school hall decorated with greenery, and a small mountain of tainted food and fresh food to the right of the hall platform. At one time the food would have been distributed back to the children, so that the poorest families received food, in effect, from the richer families. Nowadays, more often the food is sent to homes for the elderly and poor and to charities for the homeless. To me this was an English tradition, and a Christian tradition.

Sukkos for Sukkot Festival
Later I visited a synagogue in London and saw the sukkos, the autumn harvest festival where a three sided hut is constructed from tree branches and plants. it might be tied with raffia. It is often open fronted with three sides with the fourth sides against or formed by the outside wall of a home. In the nineteen sixties, seventies and eighties, in London, the religious Jews would build a sukkos in their back garden. Non-religious friends might be invited to share the ceremony.

In the late nineteen nineties or the 21st century I was invited to a multi-faith ceremony in a Sukkos built at the back of a Liberal synagogue. The purpose was to share the tradition with increasingly secular families who no longer bothered to build a sucks at home. Also to show the Sukkos to the members of the Methodist church alongside (the church and synagogue often entertaining each others members).

A Sukkos for a private home would be small. In the large communal size Sukkos the colourful fruits hung from the roof which was partly open to the sky. The ceremony included an explanation of the origin of the festival, songs and prayers, and ended with plates of fruits passed around and general conviviality and mingling.

At the end of the festival, the rule is, you must dismantle the construction entirely. A new one must be built each year. (This reminds me of the Seder night, passover, when the spring harvest requires all the old food to be discarded, because it might be infected with the mould causing St Vitus' dance, before the new harvest is brought back to be stored. In the Seder festival you have a new dining set.)

Indian
I was astonished when I went to India to see that huts for the harvest workers were in the middle of the field (guarding the harvest against robbers at night), reminiscent of biblical times in the Far East. Suddenly the Jewish festival, with its construction of a hut from fronds, tacked onto a brick building in a back yard, which had all been a puzzle to me, made perfect sense. it echoed the old days when your food for the next year was brought back from a field where the family or a servant or employee was camped out overnight in a makeshift DIY temporary hut.

As we sat over breakfast, mulling over these harvest festival memories and thoughts, I reflected that these traditions all reflected harvest and autumn festivals.

Singapore
"But Singapore doesn't have autumn, nor four seasons, nor harvests," pointed out a member of my family. "The tradition comes from China."

Maybe the harvest festivals of the Christian, Jewish, Chinese and Indian cultures are not connected. But I used to have trouble remembering whether the Jewish Sukkos and the Chinese moon festival are in the spring or autumn. Now with this mental connection, it's very clear to me and easy to remember.


Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.