Last night started Tu B’Shevat – it’s the ‘New Year of Trees’ which I guess in the most simple explanation, is the ‘Jewish Arbor Day’. It started as an agricultural festival (celebrating moving toward Spring from Winter), and there are two main things that people try to do for the holiday – eat a new fruit, and plant a tree.
I was talking with Av this morning about it – every year in elementary school, he and the other kids would bring $5 (it’s now $18) to send to JNF to plant a tree in Israel.
When Av was 15 and took one of his trips to Israel, part of his trip was to go to a JNF forest – there are *tons* of JNF forests where together over 240 million trees have been planted since 1901 – and he planted four trees, one for each grandparent.
Today, we did three things for Tu B’Shevat – we donated $18 to JNF to plant a tree in Israel, we planted our new pink perfection camellia in the yard.
…and we donated money to take part in the “Keep Mississippi Beautiful Avenue of Magnolias” program that has been going on for over 40 years. For $25, the Keep Mississippi Beautiful organization will plant a magnolia along a road leading into the state in honor or in memory of someone.
Tu B’Shevat isn’t a big holiday, but it’s still something we can do, and it will be even more fun when Shug gets older and starts to think about what he wants to plant. Of course, this is when we should be looking through the seed catalogs and think about what we want to put in the garden this year too!
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Next holiday: Mardi Gras (yay!). Av and I belong to the Jewish krewe, and our parade rolled this past weekend, but we had to stay at home this year for the first time. We’ll be there next year, though! Since we didn’t get down to New Orleans, I decided to order a king cake to be delivered from Paul’s – they make the *best*. When I make ours here, I’ll post the recipe & pics too.