Our Passover Preprarations

As many of you know, Passover is creeping up quickly. This year it starts April 8th - less than three weeks away! For our family, that means eating up all the leaven in our house before having to chuck it all out, in accordance to Exodus 12:15:

"Seven days shall ye eat unleavened bread; even the first day ye shall put away leaven out of your houses: for whosoever eateth leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel."

Like Missi's family, we put all our leaven in boxes so we can make sure to use it up! Here's what we had when we first put the boxes together...plus about 50lb of flour, and a good amount of crackers and granola bars in the van as "emergency snacks" to be used.

Now we've used up a good amount of the pasta and crackers and some of the cereal. Of course, we don't eat cereal, granola bars and pop tarts very often (actually the pop tarts are Dad's), but now that we're getting closer to Passover we're eating them a lot more, which of course everyone likes. :)

Another thing we do is clean. Although many of the rooms in our house probably don't have any leaven in them, it's a good time to do a good thorough cleaning of the WHOLE house. Even the storage closet that holds toiletries is on our clean-up list!

Of course, after all the preparation comes the actual Passover part. This year we're having a large Sedar dinner at our house with many Messianic friends. Then, the next day, my dad is going to do one for us children. That's usually pretty fun. :) We have an uncomplicated skit of the story using homemade oversize masks, a decorated table with frogs, flies and so on and lots of explaining. It usually takes about a half hour to forty five minutes, which is good for the littles!

Like it says in Exodus 12:15 (above), you're not supposed to eat leaven for seven days. Sounds easy, no big deal. Just don't eat sandwiches and spaghetti, right? He he, well don't we all wish it were that easy. If you've ever gone without leaven before, you know how hard it is! You feel like you're practically living on matzah. :)

Last year, Active Boy's birthday fell on Passover so I made him a non-leavened apple cake. It turned out all right, but as soon as the leaven-fast was over I made him a real one!

Another time, our family took a trip to Costco on Pesach (Hebrew for "Passover"). It turned out not to be such a good idea because they were sampling a ton of bread products that day...not that we remembered it was Passover or anything. Yep! I remember I was on a little blueberry muffin when Mom quietly said to us to quick throw our samples away - it's Pesach!

So yes, we are still learning, but are thankful to be celebrating the Lord's appointed feasts!

You can read more about what we do for Passover on Mother Dear's blog here: Getting Rid of Leaven and Preparing for Passover.

Love,