Last Push Purim
Deborah Cicurel recalls her own heady festival days and offers last-minute costume suggestions
Deborah is a freelance journalist
Growing up attending a Jewish school, Purim was the highlight of the year. Not because we could miss lessons to boo Haman during the Megillah, or because of the Hamantaschen we’d stuff down our throats, or because we only had a half-day before heading home.
The reason we looked forward to Purim was to gawk at the other kids’ crazy costumes. The best ones stick in the mind more than 20 years later. The girl who dressed up as a giant bagel, complete with a basket of bagels to hand out to all her classmates. The girl dressed as a biblical Rachel, with four fluffy toy sheep stuck to a skateboard, which followed her around all day. The stern teacher we’d all been rather afraid of, who shook off all prejudices we had about her when she turned up in a full Ali G costume, even adding a drawn-on goatee and randomly shouting: “Booyakashas!”
Naturally, with everyone taking Purim so seriously, I couldn’t just turn up with a funny hat on and call it a day. Therefore, every year, my dad had to embrace his artistic side and create all manner of crazy outfits for me. There was the time I insisted on dressing up as a television, which he constructed from cardboard, complete with an antenna (this was the nineties, after all), and the MTV logo.
But perhaps the hardest I ever made him work was when I begged him to let me be a headless woman holding her own head. He spent all day making that terrifying costume with hangers, cardboard and even a red scarf to indicate blood where I was apparently decapitated – and this was before the days of Google or YouTube to give him step-by-step instructions. I won’t say it was the most comfortable outfit to wear at school all day, but it definitely competed with the giant bagels and sheep-carrying Rachel.
Of course, it’s not just Jewish schoolgoers who throw themselves into competing for the best costume. A whole host of celebrities have, in recent years, shown their own Purim prowess. There was the time Madonna dressed as Daenerys Targaryen, Game of Thrones’ Mother of Dragons, wearing an actual costume from the set, no less. Another one of note is Bar Rafaeli donning a tiger outfit, complete with matching Chanel bag. Those who love and miss Shtisel will appreciate the cast’s throwback Purim photos: Akiva (Michael Aloni) as the superhero he is all for us, little ladybird Shira Haas and handsome Zohar Strauss as a native American Indian chief with what looks like knitted payas but probably wasn’t.
Even with a calendar, Purim has a tendency to creep up on us and last year’s costumes just won’t do. You may have countless World Book Day or Halloween combos, in the dressing-up drawer but to be seen twice in the same Frozen dress is unthinkable for kids who are more likely to want the Squid Game outfit from the TV show they shouldn’t have seen.
And if the festival slipped your mind and you have to wing it, the age-old trick of cutting two holes in a sheet for eyes gives you an instant ghost, just as a trawl through your glitziest costume jewellery makes for an acceptable Queen Esther. A cardboard crown and cotton wool beard for Mordechai may be more Game of Groans than Madonna’s Mother of Dragons, but who has access to a film wardrobe department? I think I should have hung on to the headless woman.
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