Sukkah Shopping on a Sunday

We were pretty much set on a wooden sukkah kit from The Sukkah Project, but when my friend Caren told me that the Lubavich Judaica shop in West Orange had an actual sukkah shop set up out back, I just had to check that out first. I must say, I was impressed with the wood panel sukkahs.

Eric and the kids in front of the fanciest sukkah I've ever seen.



This is not your mother's sukkah. I think the stained glass windows are a nice touch. You order by the panel and, depending on the size you want, you’d probably shell out one or two thousand dollars for one of these. It even has a door that locks! I later joked with Rabbi Abraham that we could just buy a bunch of these and put together Temple Sholom’s new building for a fraction of the cost!

Yaacov, who showed us the two types of sukkahs they had set up (the wood panel and a fancy canvas sukkah I’d also love to live in) told us how, as a kid in Michigan, he used to go on a sukkah hop with his friends all over the neighborhood, visiting sukkahs and stuffing themselves with the candy offered in each one and steering clear of the occasional bowl of potato salad. The experience was much like Halloween. “They were less health-conscious back then,” he laughed.

These days,  he says, he gets a lot of young families like ours shopping for a sukkah for the first time.

Alas, their beautiful sukkahs there were out of our price range, so this morning while the kids were asleep I finally went online and ordered The Sukkah Project's kit. It may be more work and it won’t be as fancy, but I think we’ll like our wooden sukkah just fine.