Martha Stewart Re-Designed My Sukkah

Because everyone else either fled town, I was stuck with an assignment I had otherwise avoided for much of my adolescent life. It's the most dreaded part of the sukkot preparation and what causes so many college students to deliberately delay coming home until moments before the chag. That's right. This year I got stuck with decorating the sukkah.

I decided to attack the beast with an organized front. With my Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in my toolbelt, I went at the first wall head on, attaching a number of those hooky thingies to the wall. From there, I had to decide what to cover it with. Because the first wall is the most noticeable and oft-mentioned, I made this the Wall of Shame. This is the section where we put up all the old crappy artwork that kids brought home through the years. My Wall has two items on it: one is the outline of an apple filled with a college of red magazine cutouts. I'm not really sure what educator assigned this task but I hope he or she has since been exiled. It's really one of the stupidest looking things ever. That's why it had to be included on the wall.

Beside it is a large piece of red construction paper with pictures of various holiday related foods like circular challah and a jar of honey. I believe the assignment here was just to color them in, only I--probably trying to finish early so I could get more snack--seemed to have taken one crayon and filled all of it in with a bunch of random zigzags across the page. So everything is covered by the same red streak. So much red, so much shame. Wall of Shame completed. I think this was provoked then by hoarding too much Ellmer's white glue in my throat

The rest of the sukkah is a mix between an autumn theme, plastic flowers and leaves hanging across the walls, and a flashback to the 1970's when laminated posters must've been the "in" thing. These are staples of any sukkah today, however, and are the most necessary component to any successful design. They're covering the fourth wall, cut off my the entranceway.

My real problem has always been that I can't draw a straight line. So after I finished, and took a look at my masterpiece, I realized that pretty much everything is crooked. My finger hurts too much from hanging those hooky thingies though and I refuse to go back and fix it.

If it's the only way to get out of this painful chore, even I have to agree with the klal on this one. Lishana Habah B'Yirushalayim indeed.

Dan