Sukkot Party!

Today is the last day of Sukkot, an eight day Biblical festival when we celebrate and thank God for His provision, and we remember when God's people lived temporarily in the wilderness after the exodus from Egypt before they entered the land God promised to them.  During this time we spend time in our own temporary dwellings.  Our family sometimes goes camping, and other times we build a "sukkah" in our backyard.  You can read more about this holiday and why I love it in my post from last year "Why I Love Sukkot". 

In order to "dwell" in a sukkah, we eat in it, pray, read, and sometimes sleep in it, and we invite guests to spend time in it with us.  This year was extra special, because we had a party in our sukkah!  We invited everyone from the Messianic fellowship where we attend, and some other friends, too.  We ended up having 20 guests.

Haley and I had lots of fun decorating the sukkah.  We went a little crazy buying decorations... it was a very good thing we found most of them at the dollar store!

We made a pumpkin spice cake with two bundt cakes put together, and an ice cream cone to make the stem.  It turned out pretty cute!

A lady from our fellowship purchased a lulav and citron, the "four species" for us all to wave.  (For an explanation about this, you can read this article about Sukkot from Hebrew4Christians.com.

At the beginning of the party, some guests made more decorations for the sukkah while we waited for everyone to arrive.

Then everyone got to build their own tiny edible sukkah! It started to rain (oh no!!!), so we finished the tiny sukkah building project inside.

Rebecca's tiny sukkah

It stopped raining (yay!!!), and we all went out and sat in and around the sukkah to read some scriptures about Sukkot.

Then we ate in the sukkah.

And then Haley brought out her guitar and led us in some singing.

And we sat around the campfire for the rest of the evening.

A great way to spend a Sukkot evening! I think we'll do it again next year!