Avivah Werner

Category: Intentional Spending

  • What kind of luggage to bring when making aliyah?

    The question regarding what kind of luggage to use when making aliyah is frequently asked, and since this is the week or our one year aliyah anniversary and I said I’ll be posting mostly this week about aliyah related topics, I’m going to answer it now!

    We packed all of our things into Rubbermaid containers – we already had these, since this is what I used to store clothes in the attic that weren’t being used in the current season. I then packed these into larger cardboard boxes; we packed a blanket or sleeping bag around each Rubbermaid box to protect it, and it was also a great way to pack these bulky but useful items without adding much weight. (I also had the right size boxes to do this, since I liquidated my nursing pillow business when we moved and was able to use the large boxes that the pillows were shipped to me in from my manufacturer. So I didn’t spend any extra money buying either Rubbermaid boxes or cardboard packing boxes.)  One of these boxes was heavy enough on its own that we didn’t pack it inside another box, and I was anxious that it would break open or crack with the rough handling that luggage experiences in transit. We taped it well with duct tape and it was fine but not all of the containers I had were of comparable quality and I had much more peace of mind packing in the way we did.

    I am so happy with how we packed! When we arrived, we didn’t have any furniture but we were able to keep things reasonably organized with the help of our plastic storage boxes. Once we got furniture, we unpacked everything, but our storage boxes still came in handy. They can be used for a variety of things; they’re sturdy, watertight, and use space efficiently. They’re also inexpensive.  These are much more expensive here than in the US, and I doubt I would have spent the money on them after arriving; I would have settled with using cardboard boxes, which aren’t nearly as efficient.  They don’t take up any extra storage space since we now use them once again in our attic for clothing storage of things not currently in use.

    What about suitcases?  Suitcases are heavy and will take up a good portion of your allotted weight, so keep this in mind when you’re deciding what to do. Also, remember that Israeli homes tend to be more compact than American homes, so where will you store lots of suitcases if you choose to bring them? We knew we’d want to have a couple of suitcases once we were here for trips, and it was worth bringing them, despite the weight disadvantage.  We’ve been glad to have both suitcases we brought, but are really glad we didn’t bring more than these.

    Some people like to use duffel bags, but I ended up giving away the two duffel bags that we were planning to pack in, since they were bigger than the official size, and by packing them so that the dimensions were within the limits, our things would be rattling around inside. However, they are lightweight, and if it’s something you’ll use after you move, then they can be a good option.

    For our carry-on luggage, we used a combination of large backpacks – we were able to bring one of our heavy duty camping backpacks like this – and small wheeled suitcases.  This isn’t weighed but it does have to fit into the airplane’s overhead compartments, so the main criteria for this is that it fits that space.

    Avivah

  • Assessing different levels of health coverage for alternative care

    >>Considering all the expenses you are going through for your kids have you considered looking at changing your kupah? IT may be worth while to look at what the costs would be: For example in Maccabi – to move up to Zehav there is a monthly fee for my husband and I and for the first 3 kids after that the rest of the kids are covered.<<

    Did I consider either going up to a higher level of coverage on my current health care plan, or switching to a different health care plan that would cover alternative care to some degree?  Yes.

    My health care plan has discounted prices on alternative practitioners in their network if we sign up for the more expensive monthly plan.  (We don’t pay anything for regular visits to standard doctors like a pediatrician, ob, nurses, bloodword; a visit to a specialist is something like 23 shekels a quarter.)  I thought this might be very worthwhile considering how many visits we’re talking about with so many children, so I looked into it.  I was lucky in that our naturopath has been working with our health care plan for years so I was able to get specific details from her, something I found almost impossible from the secretaries.

    (Here’s how the conversation there went: “Can you tell me what the benefits are of having a higher level of coverage?  “There are lots of benefits, it’s very worthwhile.”  “Yes, but can you tell me specifically what the benefits are?”  “You’ll get discounts on different things like some services and medications.”  “What medications and services will be discounted, and by how much.”  “I don’t know, but the more expensive plan is definitely worth it.”  Very difficult to get any hard facts from them to work with.)

    The naturopath told me what her price after the 60% discount from having higher level coverage at the clinic would be: 130 shekel for a first time visit, then 90 shekels for subsequent visits.  This looked pretty good since I pay 220 for a first time visit.  But although the price looked much lower, it doesn’t take into account several factors.  Firstly, the clinic visit would be 40 minutes instead of 60 minutes (subsequent visits are 30 minutes each); private visits are an hour and so far she included the second follow up visit for free.  Actually, at the last visit for dd11, I was there for an hour and forty-five minutes – she takes more time if she feels it’s necessary.  At the clinic we’d pay for each visit and  she has to stick to a very strict time schedule that doesn’t allow her to spend more time with people than what is officially allotted.  She also said there are aspects of assessment that she doesn’t include at the clinic.   And when you pay privately, she’s available by phone or email if you have any questions or concerns.  Recently a doctor at the clinic gave us her number and told us to call if there was any issue with the specific child and situation – and then when we called, she got annoyed because it wasn’t during clinic hours!

    As far as reflexology, privately she charges 120 shekels for a child per visit, for an hour.  It would be 93 shekels for a forty minute visit at the clinic.  And of course I’d have to pay a higher monthly insurance fee by at least 200 shekels a month to get the ‘discounted’ alternative services.

    For some people having the higher level of coverage is definitely a big money saver, but each person really has to assess how much they’d spent paying out of pocket and how much they’d spend with the higher level of coverage.  For us, I appreciate the quality of private care that we’re able to get, and it’s not costing us more to have it.

    Avivah

  • Homemade vitamin B supplement

    Recent bloodwork showed that a couple of our family members were very low in vitamin B – one was almost totally deficient, while the other was just regular low.  Seeing these lab results, I am assuming that other family members would also benefit by boosting their B vitamin intake.

    Vitamin B is important for so many things, and are known as ‘the happy vitamins’.   Common symptoms of being deficient in vitamin B include low energy, being tired all the time, and being depressed.  Eating sugar, processed foods, caffeine, or experiencing stress all burn through your body’s supply of vitamin B.  And though we hardly eat any processed foods or caffeine and not much sugar, moving overseas and integrating into a new culture definitely qualifies as stressful!

    A friend who is a psychologist recommended a particular vitamin B food grade supplement; she’s seen many people benefit emotionally by taking it and also said if she gets it to women right after giving birth, that there’s no postpartum depression.  I bought a bottle of it, and though her source for it was cheaper than what it would have been otherwise, it still wasn’t cheap.  When I looked at the ingredients on the bottle, I thought to myself, “I can make this!”  So that’s what I did.

    Of course, I don’t know what the proportions are, but here are the ingredients as listed on the bottle: brewers yeast (vitamin B complex), molasses (iron), fruit juice concentrates,  water, assorted herbs, spices, carob, natural vitamin C or E.

    Here were the proportions of the first batch of vitamin B mixture that I made: 250 grams brewers yeast, 200 grams carob syrup (I happened to have this in the house since someone bought some, didn’t like it, and asked if I could use it), 2 T. sodium absorbate (vitamin C), 3 small scoops bioflavanoids (I think each scoop is 1/4 teaspoon – the bioflavanoids balance the sodium ascorbate and should be taken together), cayenne pepper (I tasted this in the supplement I bought), and then I planned to add molasses and water.  When I started making my first batch, I didn’t have molasses but thought I’d be able to get it within a day.  But life happened and I didn’t get the molasses for a week, and so some of thick pasty mixture that I made got eaten by the spoonful.   Though it tasted pretty good, by adding the molasses afterward I can’t with any accuracy tell you how much was needed since I don’t know how much was already eaten.

    When I did get the molasses, I made a second batch, being a little more creative.  What I did was mix nutritional yeast, molasses, sodium ascorbate and bioflavanoids, and spirulina powder all together.  (I was sure I’d remember the proportions to share here but of course, I didn’t.  :))  Then I added some water to thin it out until it was an easily pourable syrup.  Honestly, this doesn’t taste as good as the first batch – it’s okay but I can’t say I love it – but I think it’s probably much higher in vitamins that the first batch.  And it’s way cheaper!

    Warning about using spirulina – it’s packed with vitamins but it gives everything its mixed into a dark greenish/black color that is unappealing.  The kids think this batch looks disgusting and not one of them was willing to taste it.  I don’t mind the color so much but I find the taste of molasses to be overly strong for my tastebuds, so I swallow down my tablespoon of mixture quickly and then take a drink of water.  But dh thinks the mixture tastes good, and regardless of taste, I think that this mixture is better absorbed by the body than taking a bunch of vitamins!

    Avivah

    (This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays.)

  • Canning when you can’t buy canning supplies

    >>Do you know where I can get canning supplies in Israel?? Can’t find any in my area! A lady gave me a couple dozen jars and a few lids but no rings! Have been looking and not finding anything.<<

    Back when I was the owner of over a thousand canning jars, many dozen lids, and endless rings, I decided to move to Israel, land of many things but canning supplies weren’t one of them.

    So I agonized over what to do with my canning supplies (including my heavy duty shelving units which could hold the weight of dozens of full jars), which I had acquired with much time and effort.  I very much enjoyed being able to fill my pantry with shelves of beautiful jars of food bought at great discounts and home-preserved for the long term.  I primarily canned real food (eg chicken, ground meat, vegetables and fruit) versus specialty items or jams, so I had jars I could pull off the shelf and heat up for an instant meal.

    This was mentally a hard thing to let go of, but it became obvious that I couldn’t justify the cost of an overseas container just to take my canning supplies – though there are lots of other things that would have been nice to take, those were the main things I was having trouble letting go of.  How did I make the decision to sell all of my canning supplies?

    I was able to let go of this because I had a backup plan for canning that I could do in Israel.  When I began canning, I read several books to fully understand the science of canning, the safety issues, how to prevent possible bacterial contamination, etc.  As a result, I felt I understood why each step was taken and realized there were different ways to get the same end result – a safe product.

    What was that?  Factories don’t use canning lids and rings, but rather suction lids.  Many foods you buy come in these jars, and can be used to safely water bath high acid foods (this is a very important detail).  This was my plan when I moved here, and I’ve gradually accumulated several dozen jars (thanks to one particular friend who graciously saves her jars for me!).  I bought a new canning jar lifter before I left and packed it with the things I wanted to take on the flight so I’d have it right  away, but one of the littles found it and played with it, and when I found it the boxes for the flight had been sealed.  So it will come whenever my few boxes of books arrive.

    The problem I have with these jars is that they aren’t very large, and I preferred canning in half gallon jars.  So when I canned fruit compote, we could easily use two jars for just one breakfast.  Knowing the work that goes into processing the fruits, it’s a little discouraging to see it disappear so quickly!  However, it does offer me a workable option and one that I’ve overall been satisfied with.

    Avivah

  • How to recognize redbud blossoms

    I learned about these local edible blossoms just a few days ago here, and the very day after reading about them, saw a tree next to my house that looked like the picture shared.  I was pretty positive the first time I walked by the trees after reading about them that these were redbud blossoms, but to be sure, we picked some to bring in and compare.

    Redbud blossoms
    Photo by Bob Gress – the blossoms above are mostly closed and just beginning to bloom


    Sure enough, it was a match, and I’m delighted to have another wild edible to add to my list of local foragable foods!  The tree is beautiful, and now that I know what it looks like, see that they’re in bloom all over my city.

    How can you recognize these lovely edible blossoms?  The tree is usually less than twenty feet tall, with young trees having a smooth, gray bark.  More mature trees have a reddish-brown bark with flattened scaly plates.  The flowers are a beautiful pinkish color, and the central petal (called a standard) is flanked by two more petals (called wings).  Below them are two more petals called keels.  (Tell your kids all about this when you’re picking them and you’re learning about science and botany!)  The leaves of the tree are like a heart shape.  (More details here.)

    Since we have so many dogs locally, I don’t do much foraging of things that grow on the ground for obvious reasons.  Seeing the abundance of these blossoms growing on trees so close by has got my frugal juices flowing!  I’ve scoured the internet for ideas on how to use them, and seen some yummy sounding ideas.  Use them in muffins, pancakes, for dessert with yogurt and berries, sprinkled into salad, pickled, or made into jam!

    Redbud blossoms have an almost nutty flavor; they more closed they are, the more tart they are; the open blossoms have a sweet flavor that is very pleasant.  I wasn’t surprised to learn that they are high in vitamin C, because the tart flavor makes one think in that direction.

    The young pods of this tree are also supposedly edible, but since they come out after the flowers, I haven’t yet had a chance to taste them.  I often wondered when I saw these pods if they were edible, but didn’t know what the tree was called.  Now that I know what the tree looks like, I plan to experiment by using the pods in stir fries in place of snow peas.

    Avivah

  • Vegetable shopping for Pesach

    Today I did my vegetable shopping for Pesach.  The store was very crowded and I was exhausted when I came home.  But I’ll never fail to be anything but enthusiastic about this store’s delivery service- the more I buy, the happier it makes me to know that someone else is bringing it into my house instead of me.

    I took the picture below so you can see the amount of vegetables a family our size buys for Pesach, and why I’m happy not to have to bring it up a flight of stairs.  🙂  (You’ll probably need to double click it to see it up close to realize how much is there since the boxes contain so much of it – my kids saw the picture and all said, ‘that doesn’t look like so much!)  To be clear: this is not what bulk shopping looks like for us – that would be way, way more!

    Here’s what I got, from the top left, clockwise to the right.  My receipt is in kg, so if you mentally want to convert the numbers I list, a kilogram is 2.2 pounds.

    • first box, top left – three 10 kg bags of carrots (last week we blew through one of these in 2.5 days)
    • box to the right of carrots (fruit box)- 16 kg oranges
    • two kg strawberries
    • 3 kg melon
    • 1 kg apples
    • (next box to the right – green leafy vegetables) – 4 huge heads of romaine lettuce
    • 3 bunches of fresh parsley
    • 1 bunch of fresh mint
    • (to the right slightly down) – 2 large sacks of potatoes (can’t remember how many kg is in each one – I think 18 or 20) – I actually have three sacks but started putting things away before I took the picture and didn’t want to drag it back out
    • (to left of potatoes) 10 kg cucumbers
    • 4.5 kg beets
    • 250 grams fresh garlic
    • 200 grams horseradish root
    • (next box to left) -5.5 kg  kohlrabi
    • 2.5 kg fennel
    • 7 kg cauliflower
    • 3.5 kg green cabbage
    • 2.5 kg red cabbage
    • (bags to the left) 8 kg onions
    • 12 kg red and orange peppers (also another bag in a different box)
    • 15 kg tomatoes
    • 1.5 kg radishes
    • (center right) 12 kg avocados
    If you’re wondering about prices, everything was between 2 – 4 shekels a kilo, except for the avocado (5.99), apple (6.99), strawberries (9.99)  and horseradish (31.99 kg).  I get what is seasonal and most affordable; that’s why I can’t prepare my menu until I go shopping and see what I ended up buying!

    I also have a box of turnips and some zucchini left from last week’s shopping (which are only left because no one snacks on them, unlike almost everything else).  Since we watched Hungry for Change last week, dd17 and ds13 are eating only/mostly raw (dd17 0nly, ds13 mostly) and you should see how we’re burning through the vegetables!  Also when the weather gets warm, we eat more fresh salads with our meals instead of cooked vegetables that are part of a soup or dish.  It’s a good thing, but it’s not cheap to drastically up your vegetable intake for a family our size.  On Friday afternoon I spent almost 300 shekels on vegetables – it was four boxes full – and on Sunday afternoon almost everything was gone.  Usually that amount can last for a week.  The amount in the picture would usually be enough for two weeks, but for Pesach we use a lot more fresh produce.  As it is, I’ll have to be a bit restrictive of the kids because they love fresh produce and would be happy to snack their way through most of what I got (even raw kohlrabi – they really like it!)

    I didn’t get as much fruit as I would have liked, but I was spending so much for Pesach that I felt I needed to be more careful in this area.  I’ve spent half of our monthly allotted food budget so far just for this coming week, plus there are a number of expenses due to not having any Pesach supplies (dishes, pots, silverware, etc) here.  To be fair, I also got more grape juice, extra virgin olive oil and palm oil than I need for the week or even the month, since they’re on sale now.  This is something I always try to do, be sure I have money available to buy staple items when they are on sale.  (You can see in the background of the above picture a couple of boxes with some of those other miscellaneous things – a sink insert and electric hot water pot are on top, some disposable dishes and non perishable food items are underneath.)

    For the first time ever, we kashered three pots that we use during the year as well as our silverware, and though it was a lot of work to get the bottoms of the pots spotless, it was nice that I didn’t have to buy these things!  We also kashered a stainless steel salad bowl and a couple of serving utensils.  An additional benefit of kashering these things is that it minimizes the storage space I’ll need for Pesach items for the rest of the year – I’ll just go back to using them during the year.

    Now I need to go back out and do some more shopping for the things I couldn’t get this morning –  I ran out of energy after the three stores I went to (the vegetables were just one stop).  So I’m going to rest for a short bit and then go spend more money.  🙂

    Avivah

  • Home remedies for the flu

    I realized early on this week that all the kids had the flu (funnily enough, ds18 called home and he has it, too!), though I didn’t feel like mentioning it to anyone in person because I didn’t feel like answering the inevitable question: “You didn’t give them a flu shot?”  Because if I was asked that, I would have felt it necessary to explain that the underlying assumptions about the effectiveness of the flu shot are false, along with a host of other points that I didn’t feel like getting into about vaccines concerns.  And sure enough, the first person I mentioned the flu to exlaimed, “What, you didn’t give them a flu injection?  I take it every year and I never get the flu!”

    I really dislike that the seasonal flu is now on its way to being considered life threatening, along with everything else that we have vaccinations for.  Sure enough, this same woman told me about how many people die every year from the flu – as I said, I know when starting even a casual conversation about a topic like this how ready you have to be to intelligently counter the ‘facts’ that people have heard.   

    Anyway, let me not get onto the flu vaccine issue!  The flu isn’t fun but it’s really just a super bad cold, and if you can find ways to move through it faster or more easily, that’s a good thing!    Everyone around here has been sleeping lots and drinking plenty of fluids (chicken broth and tea).  My go-to remedy for any sickness is high doses of sodium ascorbate dissolved in juice, but not all of our kids like taking it like this.  

    I realized tonight that my brain was on automatic, and I needed to pause and think about other remedies I might have on hand that would be helpful for the kids.  Here’s what I thought of:

    – Aconite – this is a homeopathic remedy ideally given at the onset of the flu, which I didn’t do because I wasn’t thinking along these lines.  The early dosage would be 3 pellets of 30 c each; I’m thinking three daily doses along for treating it at this point would be good.  Homeopathics aren’t my first line of defense because it’s not the area I feel most competent with (and I don’t know what happened to most of my remedies when we moved), but I do have aconite on hand so this is a good option even though we didn’t catch it early. 

    – Most people are deficient in vitamin D, especially in the winter when the sun isn’t out as often and doesn’t shine as intensely.  Did you ever think about why it’s so common to get sick in the winter and not the summer?  Our vitamin D levels have a lot to do with that!    One of the main immune system functions of vitamin D is to help trigger production of a substance called cathelicidin. Cathelicidin is a naturally produced antibiotic that is able to be made only in the presence of high vitamin D levels in the bloodstream.

    The littles have been having cod liver oil a few times a week, but the rest of us haven’t been very consistent with it after my initial efforts.  That’s a good option for vitamin D, but I have high quality vitamin D3 in my cabinet, and this has been shown to be very effective in fighting the flu.  (I researched this back when there was the H1NI/swine flu hysteria going around – here’s one article if you’re interested.)  3000 – 5000 IU of vitamin D3 seem to be recommended just to maintain adequate vitamin D levels; today I gave everyone 10,000 IU right now to fight the flu (this includes all the kids from age 9 and up – the littles are getting just 5000 IU). 

    Olive leaf tincture- I made a good sized batch of this back in November.  So I pulled it out and put it to use!  Rather than make everyone aware I was giving them a dose of it, I made a big batch of regular tea (which everyone requests as soon as they wake up from their extended naps), and added a couple of spoonfuls of the tincture to the large container.  The heat will cause the alcohol to evaporate, and the flavor is hardly noticeable because it’s so diluted.

    Also, yesterday my first batch of home-cured olives were finished!  These were from the olives that I picked on an outing with ds5 and ds2.  I thought I’d share instructions for this process once we tasted them, but I’m not fully satisfied with the end results – they’re okay but still have a hint of bitterness underneath.  However, as I was eating some today, I was thinking that the effective component in olive leaves is oleuropein, which is bitter.  And the reason that you spend three weeks curing the olives is to remove the oleuropein.  So maybe our health is benefiting by eating olives that still have some bitterness remaining in them!!

    A couple of kids had ear pains in addition to other symptoms, and I fortunately had a batch of what I call my ‘ear oil’ already prepared!  Very simply, this is minced garlic that has steeped in olive oil to pull out the healing properties.  Strain, and put a few drops into the ear that has pain.

    Another child had red and irritated eyes yesterday – I usually use the homeopathic euphrasia for something like this, but as I said above, most of my remedies disappeared when we moved.  So I did a bit of googling to see what I had in the house that would be useful, and learned that an eyewash made of fennel seeds or raspberry leaves would be helpful to bathe his eye. 

    It’s nice to be able to deal with this at home – everyone is feeling kind of yucky, but it’s so valuable to have something in my home arsenal to help my family. 

    What are your favourite home remedies for the flu, or even just a cold?   Have you tried any of the things I mentioned, and if so, how effective were they for you?

    Avivah

    (This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays.)

  • Steam treatment for head colds

    Today my diligent dd15 went to school in spite of my strong recommendation she stay home another day until she was fully over the flu.  She insisted she felt fine and needed to get back to school, so that she wouldn’t miss too much material.

    But the weather today shifted from warm and balmy to cold and rainy, and she came home definitely sick.   Tonight dh suggested that she do a steam head bath, something I had prepared for him a while back when he had a head cold.

    This is a simple but effective remedy that will help clear head and nasal stuffiness, as well as chest tightness.  You boil a pot of water, then pour it into a large bowl.  Add a few drops of essential oil to the mixture – tonight dh used eucalyptus oil, but tree tea oil or anything else with camphor-like qualities would also be good. These help clear the sinuses out, and can be found in most health food stores.

    [There’s a lot of hype around the quality of different essential oils, and though I happen to use the ones that many people claim are the best (Young  Living – because I was able to barter 60 pounds of spelt for a few bottles of these oils before moving!), I personally have some skepticism about that claim.  I think for this kind of steam treatment, most oils that you find in the store will be helpful.]

    After adding several drops of essential oils to the bowl of boiling water, lean over the bowl and drape a towel over your head to hold in the steam.  When I do this, I try to breathe with my mouth open to let the vapors into my lungs (I do this when I have tightness in my chest that makes it hard to breathe).  If you feel it’s getting too hot, lift the towel very briefly for a couple of seconds or totally emerge from the towel.  I try to do this for as long as there’s still steam remaining but it really depends on how you’re feeling – when you’ve had enough, then stop.

    When you finish, either pat your face dry or rinse your face with cool water (to close your pores).  Also, have a couple of cups of water to replace any fluids you may have lost during the steam inhalation.  There will usually be a noticeable improvement in how you’re feeling!

    Avivah

    (This post is part of Monday Mania and Real Food Wednesdays.)

  • Online Mesila lecture – advice for family budgeting

    About a year and a half ago, I contacted the community organization Mesila, to discuss the possibility of volunteering with them.  I had a great conversation with the head of the program,a program that is geared towards helping people get out of debt and learn to live within their means.  We were both very positive about my intended involvement – but their training for volunteer counselors was delayed.  And by the time they contacted me to ask me to actively get involved, I had to tell them that I was busy with my plans to move to Israel and just couldn’t do it.

    Recently Mesila sponsored a community-wide lecture in Baltimore, in which three prominent rabbis of the community spoke.  I began watching this with ds13, but for some reason my computer stalled after the first rabbi, Rabbi Hopfer (who is a jewel of a person), spoke.  I found his message so encouraging and validating – it was great to hear him telling the community how against the Torah way of life debt is, that having limits and learning to live within your means are actually positive values…You might say this is logical and obvious, but we live in times that are so focused on everyone having as much materially as they can, even if they don’t have the money for it, and sometimes the obvious isn’t so obvious.

    I plan to try to listen to the rest of it another time, but like what I read about the rest of the evening.  I especially appreciated that Rabbi Hauer recommended the book The Millionaire Next Door, a book that I’ve read several times and found to be helpful because it gives you a sense of how people really get rich – and it’s not by trying to look like they have more than they do!  I found this book helpful for myself as a frugal person, because it encouraged me that I was on the right path and affirmed for me that living rich is being frugal.

    Since I saw that the gist of the comments of the evening were written up, in addition to the online posting of the video of the event, I wanted to link it for others who might be interested. Here it is.

    If you watched this presentation or read through the basic overview, I’d love to hear your feedback!  What did you find to be the most important messages?  What did you agree or disagree with most?  

    Avivah

  • Why are simple weddings such a hard sell?

    Several weeks I was at a social event, where I saw someone who recently made a wedding for her oldest child.  I had heard via my husband via her husband that they had kept it small, so I took the opportunity to ask what having a small wedding entailed.  (Hearing from people who have made simple and truly affordable weddings about how they did it is very interesting to me.)

    She told me that they only invited 120 people, which I thought was impressive since it’s not easy to whittle down a guest list to that amount.  But then she added, “And the other side had 300 guests”, which shifted my perception of the wedding somewhat – 420 guests for a formal dinner didn’t seem very small to me!

    A couple of the other women there who were listening to this exchange were quick to fill me in, apparently thinking how obviously clueless I was to what was normal and appropriate.  They told me that a small wedding is 300 – 400 people for the meal, and one told me her cousin recently had 2500 guests!  (I had to ask how much that wedding cost – 4 million shekels, she said.  But at least it was a wealthy family that could afford it.)

    I shared my concern that lavish weddings have become the norm in the Orthodox world, so much that we don’t even see the lavishness of the standard wedding as unusual.  We’ve lost a communal sense of what simplicity looks like when it comes to a wedding, and we also seem to be communally oblivious to the fat that paying for these fancy weddings is way above the means of the average family.

    I thought that was a reasonable thing to say, but don’t worry, there were people there to once again set me straight.  “What do you mean?  Just the extended family from one side will be 200 people!”  I suggested, maybe we need to consider inviting people according to the budget we have to work with, and that might mean reconsidering if every single family member has to be invited to the wedding meal.  Maybe if it were normal to just invite the immediate nuclear family, rather than every cousin, aunt, uncle, and person who married in somewhere along the line, then it wouldn’t be considered so unthinkable to not invite all these people.  Shouldn’t we be thinking about how to make a wedding within our actual ability to pay for it?

    One woman shrugged and said, “So what, so you borrow the  money and pay back 1000 shekels every month for two years.”  With a family of ten children, that would mean spending twenty years of life with our extra income paying for ten evenings that last a total of 40 – 50 hours.  To  me that seems wildly disproportionate – the life energy that goes into earning that kind of money is significant.  I was feeling such a total disconnect between what I was saying and the responses I was hearing.

    Then I realized that I’m looking at the wedding situation as something that I’ll need to deal with in the foreseeable future, as the parent paying the bill, while they (as parents of much younger children) were looking at it as someone who had the bill paid for them.  It’s pretty easy to justify spending someone else’s money.  But then again, when I speak with people closer to my age group, there seems to be a fatalist attitude that this is the reality, and there’s nothing you can do.

    I have to tell you, the entire discussion left me very discouraged.  I really thought that a good percentage of people intellectually were able to see the unsustainability of expecting parents of average means to make lavish formal weddings.  I understand the difficulty in keeping things simple when there are two different families who need to come to an agreement about this, who may have very different ideas about what kind of wedding their children will have.  When you’re making a bris, bar mitzva, kiddush, etc, you’re the sole arbiter of how much you spend on these family milestones.  For us, all of these events have been celebrated with much joy but always spending within our means.  I realize that I can’t assume it will always be like this.  But I thought there were many others who at least wished they could stay within their means.  Now I’m no longer so sure about that.

    This conversation came shortly after a talk with a friend whose oldest child just got engaged.  She was sharing with me the pressure they’re feeling to buy the groom the mandatory gifts, particularly since the other side is financially much more comfortable and has already sent their daughter jewelry that they are trembling about how to reciprocate for.  They’ve been working hard for the past few years to get out of credit card debt and live within their actual financial means (using lots of money saving tips I’ve shared here on my blog), and facing the expenses of a wedding (and pre-wedding) are very daunting.

    If you don’t know about the insanity of the standards for the mandatory gifts that need to be given to the bride and groom prior to and at the wedding, I don’t think I should enlighten you.  You’re just better off not knowing.  Because it’s disturbing.  Really disturbing.  Sometimes I wonder if the central point of getting married is getting somewhat lost in all the materialistic expectation around an engagement/marriage – I thought when I got engaged to my husband that he was the treasure (and the years have shown I was more right than I could have guessed).

    When I got home later that evening, I was reflecting on the conversation with these women, and had a sudden realization about a big contributing factor for the disparity in our views.  I’ve written loads here about different things I’ve done to live within our means; it’s not a secret that I feel strongly that being responsible means living with what we have and not what I wished we had!

    To me, debt is something to avoid and with the exception of a mortgage, have managed to live with the money we actually have our entire married life.  Sometimes people make assumptions about the amount of money we must have been making to do this (way over our actual income);  I think people would rather think we were really lucky rather than recognize we consistently were willing to make hard choices.  Living within our means hasn’t always easy – sometimes we did without, sometimes we had to wait a while until we saved up the money for it.  We’ve had to be very clear with ourselves about the difference between wants and needs, though we’ve often marveled at how many of our wants have been provided for.

    It occurred to me that if you see debt as a normal tool for everyday living, my position really does seem ridiculous.  Why should you deny yourself something as nice as everyone else, if you can borrow the money and pay it back later?  If you’ve spent your life living this way when it comes to groceries and clothes, then a wedding is just the next logical step.  If debt is normal, then it shifts your entire view of spending.

    So what’s the answer to this issue?  It’s a lot bigger than me, that’s for sure!  And I don’t know what I’ll do when faced with this decision – there’s tremendous social pressures on everyone when making a wedding.  I think we live in a world where so many of our decisions are made because we’re worried about what others think of us.  If we were able to put that aside and be honest about who we are and what our resources were, instead of pretending to have what we don’t have to impress people who don’t really care that much about us, then the idea of making a simple wedding wouldn’t be such a hard sell.

    Did you have a simple wedding?  In what ways were you able to cut costs?  Do you think that spending less compromised the overall enjoyment you had at your wedding or not?

    Avivah