Pass the Manischewitz Over

Technically, my family should have had our Passover sedar last night. We didn’t. After all, we have our sedar in my dad’s bar/restaurant now, and he couldn’t close the bar on a Saturday night. That would be small business suicide.

So we’re having it tonight. He’ll close the bar from about 6-8 and we’ll get more drunk than we used to.

We used to have the sedar at my house. My mom would spend days preparing all the food; the brisket stewing in two bottles of wine and a packet of Lipton onion soup mix, the store-bought chocolate matzahs and the slowly graying hard boiled eggs stacked up in the fridge near the billows of parsley. The family would come over, maybe 10 or sometimes 16 of us, eventually terribly drunk off Manischewitz wine and complaining about the taste. My dad never hid the matzah very far, and eventually stopped hiding it at all: It’s on the table! The best hiding place of all!

Now we get shit faced. I don’t say that lightly. Between the customary Manischewitz on the table, the entire bar is open, we gulp shots of Slivowitz and make strong jack and cokes and vodka tonics and single malts on the rocks. My grandmother is especially known for getting faschnooked. She’ll do shots with the best of them and then disrupt the 15-minute haguddah reading with giggles and jokes. One year my grandfather passed her soapy towel (to clean our hands, I think?) and she threw it back in his face, hollering, “I don’t want your sloppy seconds, Sam!” That may or may not have been the same year she had a tea-bag fight with my aunt.

Does my family drink too much? Probably. But we’re not sad drunks. We’re happy loving people who like to knock back a couple and tell dirty jokes. And if you think Passover is bad, you should see us on Thanksgiving.