Burst Bubble

I always tell people that working at Mishpacha is like an accounting job with two tax seasons; the catch is that both inevitably fall out during the busiest seasons in a Jewish home. Just when the pressure of Yom Tov preparation is highest — during the Yamim Noraim pre-Succos season and before Pesach — that’s when the magazine pressure peaks.

After the frenetic Pesach preparations that overtake so many aspects of our lives, the actual Yom Tov feels like another planet. We’ve just spent weeks glued to our computers, losing track of day and night, focusing intensely on the Yom Tov package. Somehow we make it to Yom Tov (every staff member has his or her own resources and coping mechanisms to make it there, and some details are best left unspoken) and gratefully enter a cocoon of family togetherness. During this otherworldly week, our schedule revolves around leisurely meals and family outings. Our desks and computers feel very far away.

For most people, climbing out of that cocoon tends to be a gradual process. It takes a few days for the tempo to pick up — for bedtime no longer to be a friendly suggestion, for mornings to feel urgent again, for magazine grids to take on the same immediacy they held two weeks earlier.

But come Isru Chag, when much of the world is still rubbing its eyes, when chometz is still a fresh delight, when the mountains of sorted and spritzed laundry are still impassively waiting their turn for the washing machine, we inevitably bid goodbye to our sleepy homes and return to the office.