Every Friday night my family sits down to Shabbat dinner. It's to celebrate the start of Saturday, which is the day of rest for Jewish people (all Jewish holidays run sundown to sundown). On Friday, my uncle and grandma come to our house for dinner. My mom told me that when she was growing up, the Shabbat dinners rotated between their house and her aunt's house. But in our family, we are the keeper of the Shabbat dinners. We go to my uncle's house once or twice a year for a meal, but never on Shabbat.
My brother and I rarely miss Friday Night dinners––it's a family tradition that just feels right. We always recite blessings over the wine and challah (twisted egg bread) before dinner, but my mom is iffy when it comes to lighting the Shabbat candles and welcoming Shabbat in song. There are rules: if we have friends over for dinner, we light the candles; if we have guests who are not Jewish, then my dad gives them a run-down on Shabbat and what the blessings mean. My brother and I always grunt when he starts his speech, although I suppose when I grow up it's going to be one of the things I'll be glad he did. Once we had a non-Jewish family over, and when we started singing the blessing over the candles, they thought we were singing Happy Birthday and chimed in. It was memorable.
Dinner doesn't vary much, and it's always delicious. My favourite is Caesar salad with oven-baked fries, barbecued grass-fed steak and my old stand-by, challah. We've been having a lot of blueberry pie lately for dessert, because we have a lot of blueberries that we froze over the summer.
People sit around talking after dinner, although not me. I usually crash in front of the TV and then go to bed. I have to get up early to clean stalls in horse stables. I don't really get to rest on Shabbat, although that's the point of it.
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