These are pictures from our seder. You might be doing the math and thinking about the demo pictures and wondering exactly how one has 25 people to dinner six days after closing on such a house. And it would be a reasonable question.
You might also note that the table is set with good china and glassware. You see, my mother has had an attic full of six generations of china for I don't know how long, and it has been her life's mission to get one of the three of us siblings to take it off her hands. So when I said I was having a seder in the new place, hell or high water, she loaded a rather alarming amount of it in her Volvo and trucked it on down to Brooklyn.
I'm fortunate that I have both a mother and a partner who long ago learned that, even when I'm doing something that is very clearly insane, it's not useful to point that out to me. So we had a seder, dammit, with good freakin china, in our house with absolutely nothing but a dazzling array of power tools in it. My mother and girlfriend shut up and chopped the stuff I told them to chop, and thank god, because it really wouldn't have happened otherwise.
The guests were very tolerant of fact that I didn't actually get to comb my hair or change out of my pajamas before we started the seder, and that I put them to work chopping swiss chard and setting the table when they arrived. There's a reason I pick the friends I pick.Self-deprication aside, it was a really really beautiful night, and I can't think of a better way to celebrate the new house than cramming 25 people in it and feeding them until they rolled home.
