Living in Israel: The dreaded gan party

Have you been hearing a strange sound every evening for the past week or so? Sort of like the sound of air intermittently escaping from a soon to be flat tire? In case you were wondering, what you've been hearing is the sound of thousands of Israeli parents trying desperately to stifle ther yawns as they once again suffered through another annual round of Hanuka gan parties. If you listened really carefully you might have noticed how after 90 minutes or so the yawns turned into sighs of relief as the sufganiyot were brought out and the yearly rite came to a merciful end.

I have four children, each of which attended three years of gan before moving on to first grade. Each year of gan brought with it three parties: Hanuka, birthday and siyum. Multiply 3 parties by 3 years by 4 children and you get 36 parties. Average that over 10 years (from my oldest's first year of gan to my youngest's last) and you get an average of 3.6 parties a year for a solid decade.

36 opportunities to sit for an hour and a half on a munchkin chair with my knees competing for space with my shoulders. 36 opportunites to take out my old PSD camera and try to get a decent picture of my beloved one reciting his/her lines without including the 4 adults standing up in front of the first row while they video the whole show. 36 opportunities to ooh and ah when the teacher turns off the lights and the ribbons tied to the kids hands glow with reflected UV light. 36 opportunities to watch the kids mill around the "stage" with cardboard candles affixed in some way to the general area of their foreheads.

At least the cardboard candles provide some variety: some years they're stapled together; sometimes they're glued; occasionally they're just slotted together; and I think I've also seen paper clips and rubber bands used as well.

3.6 parties a year. And then it stopped. But not really. It turns out that kids continue with gan parties all the way through school - they just call them something else. For example, when my daughters graduated 6th grade they each had a tekes siyum. But the only material difference that I noticed between the tekes siyum in 6th grade and the misibat siyum in kindergarten, was that that the 6th grade tekes lasted a lot longer. Well, maybe there was another difference - the gan parties seemed a bit more organized and better planned. I guess practice does help.

Sometimes there's no school milestone to celebrate, but that's not a problem because your child's youth group fills in nicely with at least one or two similarly mismanaged and boring events a year.

Of course there is one common denominator between all these events that I've ignored up until now. While we parents are typically invited, the event is usually for and about the kids. So if they can enjoy them, I guess I can grin and bear it for their sakes. That is, of course, until medical research proves that sugar, oil and small yearly doses of UV radiation cause cancer in labratory rats.