Succot is by far my favorite Yomtov. it's always been like that since I'm a little kid. i love the season of fall, and i love every minute of the holiday

we've kept every decoration I've ever made. right from first grade up through ninth. there was the sand art i made in third, the tracing i did in fifth {that's the one that has wrong spelling which brother 1 so lovingly points out in front of all the company} since sister1 and i are a year apart we have a lot of doubles. of course we have the traditional 'holiday bling' as my mother likes to call it. she recently learned that word so she likes to use it. we make our chains out of a hard plastic material that my grandfather's company uses so we don't have to replace it every year. in the past its been my job to hang up pine in the Sukkah , and sister1 has the task of hanging up the 'holiday lights' (both longstanding family traditions) but we've been so busy with school and sister 1 shorted the lights last year and hasn't replaced them so our Sukkah is lacking both.

my dad always talks about the Sukkah hops he took as a kid. to me, they were just Jewishified trick or treating. and i didn't need some stale popcorn, or old candies, because the shul i davened in on Simchat Torah gave out enough candy to last until Purim. one year i got roped into leading a Bnos Sukkah hop, and that was enough to turn me off forever.

once again, my Chol Hamoed has been yanked out from under me. at least this year i have my test on the first day of Chol Hamoed of on the last day, so i still get Sunday off. my professors who aren't Jewish at all were very accommodating about me missing class, that is, once i explained to them that there are two different types of holidays, the kind i can come in on, and the kind i cannot. my friend who has a frum professor wasn't so lucky. she had a class last night at seven thirty, and she couldn't tell her professor that she couldn't make it because of a holiday, so the second Yomtov was over she hightailed out of her house to school. ugh.

the Hillel my college got lucky today. they were having some concert and it was raining, so lots of people were coming inside the Sukkah to take shelter. although they usually do have a fairly large turnout.