"MAKING PESACH", by Mrs. Joe Blogs

For me pesach can be divided into 3 parts: 

The social side of it starts on the eighth day.  No, that was a joke.  The social side of it really starts immediately after one pesach finishes.  This is when I make notes about what went wrong, what I will/won't be doing next year, who I don't need to invite again just yet and what dishes went down well.  The rest of the year until chanuka is mainly just an extended planning meeting with myself  (and occasionally Mr. Blogs), with all the plans being put into effect according to a built-in timetable over the next year.

The religious side starts in the two weeks before yom-tov (ie pesach), when I remember that I need to order a zeroah - not just 4 cows and 60 chickens.  Then I can relax on this score until literally erev pesach when we finally burn the chometz, or sell it, and make the appropriate declarations before Hakodosh Boruch Hu.

The chinuch aspect is another story altogether.  I need to teach my kids how to make pesach the way my grandmother's great-grandmother did it, and it is not easy to do this now that we have things like electricity and freezers etc; and I am mindful of the catering and hospitality timetable (and the rest of our lives going on regardless) which are skills I also wish to pass on to my kids.  So when we get to post-purim, I start emptying cupboards while everyone is out and leaving all the contents on the kitches surfaces, stairs, anywhere.  I leave some sort of cleaning products in the cupboards, leave the doors open - and then I am free for the rest of the day to organise the bedding requirements, visit the butcher and fish shop, pop down to the West End for a little 'time to myself' (yeah right), and get the MoT done.  If I'm home by half five, the kids will ask me why everything is out of the cupboards and I can tell them that its getting close to pesach and how will the chometz be removed if nobody lifts a finger??  Every year I moan to the kids about cleaning the oven etc, but they have never actually seen me do it (for pesach).  After they break up they do it, for the chinuch.  I am moaning because it adds to the atmosphere and they need to learn how to moan with kavono even though we no longer have the Beis Hamikdosh. 

B"H  the rabbonim were kind enough to invent things like selling the chometz, token searchings and burnings, declarations (and there is always Yom Kippur remember), so that the only serious challenge of the festival is the catering and hospitality.  And the in-laws.  And the diet. And the shiurim Mr. Blogs goes to just to test me.  The rest is a piece of cake with some technical difficulties instead of cherries on the top.  Any normal housewife can deal with those.