Last year we discovered a new Easter week tradition--the Jerusalem Dinner. I had discovered a wonderful book, A Christ-Centered Easter: Day-by-Day Activities to Celebrate Easter Week , by Janet and Joe Hales. We actually held a full-fledged Holy Week celebration, starting with Palm Sunday and ending with Easter Day. This year, since Easter crept up on us so quickly, we opted to tone things down a bit. But the Jerusalem Dinner was a must! It was D's favorite part of our Easter celebrations last year, and we simply had to do it again this year!
Tonight was the night. I would have preferred to do it on Thursday, since that would have been the correct day to commemorate the Last Supper. But this week has been too busy, so Friday sufficed. It's very simple--we re-create a meal that would have been typical in Jesus' time. We get to eat on the floor (reclining in the Roman tradition), and we don't have to use plates or utensils. That in and of itself makes this meal appealing to the 5 and under crowd. Our menu consisted of a cucumber and yogurt salad; a pilaf made from bulgur wheat, red onions, coriander, cinnamon, and mint; flatbread with which to dip the previous menu items; cantaloupe, grapes, olives (always a hit!), almonds and dates, and a drink of grape juice.
After our second year of enjoying a Jerusalem Dinner, we have just a few questions about life in ancient Israel: Did little Jewish children love to stick olives on their fingers like modern LDS children do? How on earth did the people during Jesus' time keep their toddlers from wreaking total havoc on the dinner when all the food was in grabbing distance? (S ended up covered with bulgur wheat pilaf.) Did Jewish daddies have Jewish toddlers climbing all over them as they reclined to eat? How much grape juice got spilled during a typical meal? (OK, so we didn't actually spill any grape juice, but we sure worried about it happening!)
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