Listen to the Rain

Chinese food.

Yesterday we went to Ming Hin, where arsduo in years past had held his Erev Christmas gatherings. He's moved to Toronto to be with his partner, but I decided after three years to take up the mantle and continue the tradition. I invited a bunch of people, some of them could come, and at 6 p.m. we met up for Chinese food:


Delicious.

I was hoping to have a Russian-speaking contingent there (shoutout to aguart), since tom.hen.12's wife is Russian, dinaraua is Khazak and speaks Russian, and maptekar is Ukrainian and speaks Russian. But both of the latter couldn't come, so my plans were foiled. Someday!

After dinner, the others stood around outside while I gave sashagee some time to have a grown-up conversation and chased Laila around--she saw a maybe seven or eight year old jumping from small stone bench to stone bench and demanded that I help her make the same jumps. Then we went to Uni Uni for boba, I got a coconut milk taro tea with coconut milk jelly that was AMAZING, and we all went home. Laila didn't get to bed until 10 p.m. but by 8 a.m. she was awake and demanding to be let out...and then took a four hour nap. So it goes.

Today, as our first full day back at home, we did absolutely nothing. I was going to go shopping, but I was foiled by Whole Foods being closed, so we...ordered Chinese food. The Halaḥah is clear--while it is permissible to eat it on the 24th, the 25th is praiseworthy, though there is a maḥloket on some issues:

While the rest of the questions above are good she’elot, poskim generally hold that the food must be either purchased from a Chinese restaurant or recognizably Chinese, but ideally both. If your food is in one category but not the other, the accepted practice is to eat a fortune cookie (the symbol of American Chinese restaurants) in order to rule out a safek of any kind.

So if you’re on a diet, sushi would be fine (b’dieved) as long as it was purchased from a Chinese restaurant and not a specifically sushi establishment, as long as you also ate a fortune cookie.

Judaism is like that.

Merry Christmas to all my Christian friends!