Welcome to the season of Sukkot, a time of family, community, and the realization that you have 3.5 days to build a hut on your lawn. So pull out the work gloves you haven’t used since last Sukkot and let’s get started!
- Buy the sukkah, thereby emptying your child’s college fund in the process.
- Alternatively, if you already own a sukkah, curse yourself while removing all parts from the impossible-to-reach locations you left them in last year.
- Take out instructions.
- Just kidding, you’ve long since lost the instructions.
- Sort out all the different pieces by type and size. Sigh in relief as you discover the project is not as large as it seems.
- Realize you forgot to take out 50% of the parts.
- Take out the remaining pieces. Generously reapply the duct tape that is keeping most of them intact.
- Begin installation.
- Realize that you installed the pieces backwards. Uninstall and fix the problem.
- Discover that the pieces are somehow STILL backwards???
- Allow your children to start helping.
- Spend three hours fixing their “help.”
- Finalize the frame of the sukkah. Discover that this took twice as long as you allotted for the entire project.
- Begin hanging canvas walls, carefully avoiding the holes that have grown bigger and bigger each year.
- Fail to avoid making the holes even bigger.
- Take call from co-worker asking what you are up to. Quickly change the subject.
- Wonder why someone hasn’t created a sukkah rental service.
- For that matter, why hasn’t someone created a Pesach dishes rental service???
- Complete walls.
- Assure yourself the leftover pieces are just “extras.”
- Begin hanging roof beams.
- Hope that nobody you’ve invited over chag is actually familiar with the halachas for a valid sukkah.
- Resentfully wonder why your neighbor can hang up fake cobwebs and giant skeletons, but YOU’RE the weird one.
- Hang s’chach (roof material).
- Remove the ten splinters you now have in your fingers.
- Welcome in the bee colony that will be treating your sukkah as their new home.
- Take out the moldy box of decorations.
- Try to sort out years’ worth of decorations. Give up and hang melded hybrid decorations.
- Set up an outdoor extension cord that theoretically goes for 50 feet but is hopelessly tangled into 10.
- Hang up Christmas lights. Feel weird about it.
- Set up Costco folding table. You know the one.
- Set up chairs, none of which come from the same set.
- Take a moment to stand back and admire your work.
- Watch as a light gust of wind blows away half your work.
- Rehang s’chach and decorations.
- Eat inside because it’s raining.
