Happy Passover, Happy Easter

Tonight begins Passover, the annual celebration of the Jewish people’s exodus from Egypt.  We have two seders, or as I like to call them, “The big meal”. Family and friends gather (fortunately not at my house) and eat charoset (it reminds of the mortar used in brick-building, but is presumably much tastier), horseradish root (and clear our sinuses out), and we dip parsley in salt water. And this is all before the meal. The meal – and this holds true whether we are at my in-laws house, as we will be for the first night, or at my parent’s house, where we will be the second – generally consists of chicken soup with matzo balls (I pass on the matzo balls and continually hope to not have my Jew Card revoked), gefilte fish, hard boiled eggs, turkey, sweet and sour meatballs, brisket, chicken, mashed potato kugel (mashed potatoes, mixed with eggs, oil and onions then baked… mmmmmm) and various other side dishes. Then we have dessert.

But the holiday doesn’t end here (although I kind of think it should). We have eight glorious days of matzo eating. We eat matzo in various forms: with cream cheese, slathered in tomato sauce and cheese (“matzo pizza”), as the basis for a tuna melt and with eggs (“matzo brie”). The ensuing ate-too-much matzo constipation is never pretty.

In the midst of all of this, our Christian friends celebrate Easter, eat chocolate, hunt for eggs and then move on. Not us. We are not so good at the moving on.  We’ve got eight days of no bread, pasta, rice or beans. Well, Sephardic Jews eat rice, beans and the like, but not us. Not this year, anyway. It is possible I will convert before 2012, though.

The holiday hasn’t begun yet and I am already looking forward to my post-Passover plate of pasta. Is that a bad thing?