Getting Ready For Shabbos
We just nailed down the time that our shabbat dinner guests are coming tonight. 7:45. It reminded me of something I heard R. Zalman Schachter Shalomi say when I was a kid.
Some folks were scurrying into shul late and someone said that it is hard to get to shul on time when candle-lighting time is so early in the winter. He reminisced about the time he spent in Manitoba and how often shabbos wouldn’t come in until 9:30pm in the summer and the ladies of the siterhood would still be running around in a haze right before candle-lighting no matter what time of day it was.
With that, shabbat shalom to all.
I, for one, am every bit as likely to be running around like a chicken with its head cut off at 8pm when shabbos starts at 8:03 as I am to be running around freaking out at 4:30 when shabbos starts at 4:35. The thing about summer is I feel like I CAN get a lot done on a Friday. I don’t start prepping for shabbos until the mid-afternoon because I can get away with it. So I do other stuff, that other stuff takes too long, I underestimate how much time I need, and then… tada, it’s exactly like a December shabbos. I think this is a nearly universal thing for people who make and keep shabbos… except those who get take out for shabbos (which is, i’ve discovered, a lot of people!)
And the flip side of it is, last night I had to wake people up to do Havdalah. Not so in the Winter.