Five days after the most serious day on the Jewish calendar -- Yom Kippur -- here are the seven days of joy called Sukkot (also referred to as Succos). Sukkot begins on Friday, October 2nd at sunset.

This is a celebrative harvest festival that involves the construction of fragile, decorated huts, called sukkah, or booths. While the huts may be made of a variety of materials, it is required that the sky be visible through the roof of the sukkah.

While it is commonly said that these huts are a reminder of the way that Jews lived when they wandered the desert for 40 years, I did find a Rabbi who contests that, saying the Jews lived in tents in the desert, not huts, and adds "The sukkah is in fact reminiscent of the temporary shelters used during the autumn harvest in which both harvest and harvesters took shelter."

During Sukkot week, all meals are to be eaten in the sukkah, which has been festively decorated by the family. Sukkahs vary from family to family, climate to climate. Some are wooden, others canvas -- they all follow a set of instructions about general size and certain qualities, but they differ widely based on the builders. Kits can be purchased for "pre fab" sukkahs, design plans can be obtained on the web or they can be built from scratch.

Even families living in apartment buildings find ways to build a sukkah.

This is a huge contrast to the holy days and deep inner contemplation that have preceded it. It is a sort of grand exhalation, a stretching of the spirit upwards, a shout of Halleluia.

Nina reminds us that this holiday has lessons in it for people of all faiths:

The sukkah symbolizes the fragility of all life, which can be taken down, removed, at any moment. Much like our bodies, it offers temporary shelter, and if we take the time to look through the cracks in the roof we can see through to essence of who we are and to our connection with Source. Jews decorate these sukkot (plural for sukkah) with things that represent that which sustains all of humanity-all the goodness and abundance of the world around us, such as the harvest items.
Then, inside these structures, they feast and pray by getting up and shaking ritual items in a physical celebration of life. They joyously celebrate another year of their own life as well as the life of the earth itself, the essence of physicality, and all that She gives to sustain us.

The ritual items she mentions are these :
"The Four Elements" (list taken from Wikipedia)

* Lulav – a ripe, green, closed frond from a date palm tree
* Hadass – boughs with leaves from the myrtle tree
* Aravah – branches with leaves from the willow tree
* Etrog – the fruit of a citron tree

Some groups of Jews build the roof of their sukkah with the Four Elements. Most, however, gather the branches of the elements together to ritually wave them as they pray special Sukkot prayers.

Sarah gives a good Biblical summary of the roots of Sukkot:

In Leviticus, God told Moses to command the people: “On the first day you shall take the product of hadar trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook” (Lev. 23:40), and “You shall live in booths seven days; all citizens in Israel shall live in booths, in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt” (Lev. 23:42-43). In the time of Nehemiah, after the Babylonian captivity, the Israelites celebrated Sukkot by making and dwelling in booths, a practice of which Nehemiah reports: “the Israelites had not done so from the days of Joshua” (Neh. 8:13-17).

This festival is a family and neighborhood event, with families helping others build their sukkahs, and everyone admiring and often visiting everyone else's.

The spiritual joy is also in the reminder that fragile dwellings saw the Jews through their exile, because the real substance was their relationship with G-d. Home quite literally was where the heart was, where the faith was.

Debbie describes a bit about the sukkah here :

They decorate the Sukkah (singular of the word) and eat all meals there during the holiday. (My father used to sleep in it, too.) It is very fun for kids because they help decorate the sukkah, and also visit other Sukkot in the neighborhood, eating candy and other treats there, sort of like on Halloween (but no tricks or treats, and it’s way more spiritual).
It’s a very nature-oriented/outdoorsy holiday: At night, you have to be able to see the stars through the leaves and branches that compose the roof. And many of the traditional decorations are gourds and colored, dried corn.

Sara compares Sukkot to Thanksgiving -- she also has a great looking recipe for chicken with honey date sauce!

Sukkot is the Festival of Booths, Huts, and/or Ingathering, depending on where you get your information. The third agricultural festival of the secular calendar, and the one that corresponds to the end of our growing season, it is a celebration of the bounty of the season and thanks to God for making it happen.
Sukkot is a particularly fun holiday in my book — you eat outside under your sukkah, use food as art, and revel in the freshest stuff the farmers market has to offer — because it doesn’t matter where you’re celebrating, the point is to celebrate what grew in your neck of the woods.

Aliza, a convert to Orthodox Judaism, exlaims her love for this holiday:

Maybe I just love sukkahs. I think that's probably it. I adore the miniature versions you see on the terraces of homes in Brooklyn ("sukkah in a box," anyone?). I love the grand (darn, already used that word in this post) sukkahs in Los Angeles. One of them I said was "the best restaurant I'd ever been to" because the decorations were fierce (fake grapes, anyone?) and the food was divine (if unidentifiable). My engagement party was one big sukkah party where my husband told everyone I was his kind of weird and that's why he loved me. (Okay, he put it more eloquently than that.) And something about sukkahs takes me back to building fort-like structures in my living room in Washington Heights. Sigh. Oh, Sukkot, how I love thee.

Rachelhas a great display of sukkah taken as "they spring up almost overnight" in Jerusalem.

Tzipporah in Oregon will be inviting company to share meals in their sukkah for the first three nights. She links to an exciting recipe for "Duck with Honey and Lavender" served with "garlicky greens, carrots and parsnips".

Karen includes a list of various green Sukkot events in Tel Aviv this year.

Mrs Anna T enjoys the festivity of the holiday:

This weekend and next week we will be celebrating Sukkot. After two days of hard work, our sukkah is already set up in the yard and waiting, the only thing that is left is to decorate it. I love seeing all the sukkot springing up around the neighbourhood; it's so lovely to see families gathered in there, a little crowded but happy, eating festive meals and simply being together.

Elana talks about the hierarchical gender distinctions that are made during Sukkot. She describes them in some detail. She concludes by saying:

The message of Sukkot should be an equalizing one. We are all stuck in the huts, all equally exposed to the elements. Living in the desert, no one family had a bigger house, job, or paycheck and everyone relied on God’s generosity and compassion.
I’d like to bring back some of that equality. That’s why I sleep in the Sukkah with my kids. We should all breathe the same air and wake up with the same cricks in our backs. Now that, to me, is the Jewish way.

How many of you have actually built a sukkah? Please share your Sukkot experience with us.

To those of you celebrating this happy occasion -- may you be blessed with joy throughout the year ahead!

Mata H is CE for Religion and Spirituality and blogs at Time's Fool