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Jewish Life & Celebrations

Sukkot

Decorating your own sukkah

Rabbi Judith Seid
Rabbi Seid offers creative ideas to build and decorate a sukkah, using nature and harvest images. Rabbi Seid is the author of We Rejoice in Our Heritage: Home Rituals for Secular and Humanistic Jews, and God-Optional Judaism: Alternatives for Cultural Jews who Love Their History, Heritage, and Community. Rabbi Seid is also the cultural leader at Tri-Valley Cultural Jews in Pleasanton, California. Visit Rabbi Seid at www.SecularJewishWeddings.com

Judith Seid, God-Optional Judaism, Citadel Press, 2001, pp 77-78.

If you have made a sukkah without permanent walls, you can use sheets or other large pieces of cloth as walls. During the holiday, you can decorate one of the sheets each year. Be sure to date the sheet. In several years, you’ll have four lovely sukkah walls and a family artistic history.

To decorate, try apple prints with tempera paint, or leaf prints with spray paint. Cut an apple though the equator, dunk it into paint, and press it onto the sheet. Or cut shapes from the apple and use them to paint with. You can cut fruit shapes or leaves or stars or flowers or anything else that suits you.

For leaf prints, collect leaves of lots of sizes and shapes. Lay them on the sheet, weighing them down with little stones, and spray paint over them. When you pick them up, you’ll see leaf shapes in negative. Or draw a tree trunk and branches onto the sheet with a crayon. Then decorate the branches with painted leaves of many colors and shapes. You can use crayons to draw fruit, too, or, if you’re ambitious, supply bits of pretty fabric and appliqué or glue fruit shapes onto the walls.

Make decorations to hang from the sukkah along with your fruit. The youngest children can make paper chains. Older kids and grown-ups might like to make origami flowers or stars. Tissue-paper flowers are pretty, too. Use your imagination – anything that is pretty or symbolic of the harvest can be used to decorate your sukkah.

You might also like to make bird feeders, since Sukkot comes close to the start of winter. Take the inner cardboard cylinder from a toilet paper roll and punch a hole near one end. Smear the whole thing with peanut butter and roll it in birdseed. During Sukkkot, hang it inside the sukkah for decoration. When you take down your sukkah, hang the feeder on a tree for the birds to eat from all winter long.

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