A snippet of a Purim song — all that I think my Dad remembered — floated through my mind this past week as we approached the Jewish festival of Purim. While the religious cause of the celebration is the Jews' escape from the genocide proposed by the Persian vizier, Haman (as described in the book of Esther), the celebrations are loud, drunken, and often in costume — to the point where it's best described as "the Jewish Mardi Gras".
The marquee food of this festival is Hamantaschen — a triangular shaped cookie or pastry, traditionally filled with poppy seed paste or prune butter, though modern filling variations range from fruit preserves (usually raspberry or apricot) to chocolate, peanut butter, or even pastry cream. Depending on which story you hear, the name refers to Haman's hat, his ear, or his pocket/money pouch. At any rate, when we eat them — just as we shout, stamp, and wave noisemakers (graggers) during the public reading of Esther — we are obliterating the name of the story's villain.
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| Purim T-Shirt with cardstock positioning template |
I Googled the snippet I remembered, only to find that I had learned the first part of the snippet incorrectly, that the lyrics came from a 1940s-era pedagogue, and that the familiar children's melody came from a drinking song often heard at Renaissance faires. (The pertinent results here.)
Of course, I would bake Hamantaschen (how could I not?)... but I also had an idea for a fun Purim T-shirt. (Hey, I'm a bit old to pass for Queen Esther or Queen Vashti, and nobody dresses up as Haman's wife!) I was able to use the basic shapes in Design Space to create a bitten-into Hamantaschen and some scattered crumbs, along with Cookie Monster's patented "nomnomnomnomnom" for my design.
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| Shirt next to real homemade Hamantaschen |
While a shift at work meant I was not going to get drunk enough to not know the difference between "Blessed is Mordechai" and "Cursed is Haman", I have another shirt design to share (my Design Space profile here).
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