How We Do An Upsheren

How do you celebrate and how much do you spend?

My sister-in-law who does graphics made an invitation for us that we emailed and texted to some people. The same talented sister-in-law took pictures of my son a few weeks before — we didn’t have a professional photographer. We all wore what we had from that season. We didn’t serve a full meal — more of a buffet of small desserts. My sister made us a beautiful tzitzis cake and some relatives made other things.

–Dov and Leah Ackerman

We make a party at our house. For our first couple of boys, we printed photo invitations that were cute but quite expensive, so eventually we moved to paperless post. We don’t get special upsheren outfits, we just wear our nicest Shabbos outfits. My husband has an excellent camera so he takes the pictures, but I do splurge on one professional upsheren picture. I’ll look for deals for that.

–Leah Lowy

So far, we’ve had five upsherens and they were all different. For the first one, I went completely over the top, rented out a shul, created a slideshow, prepared fancy pekelach. My second one was a little less fancy, but also pretty extravagant — we even had relatives fly in from out of town for the event. Those two were over 15 years ago and I no longer remember exact costs.

Since then, I started having the upsherens at the local Chabad house or at home, and have scaled down a lot. No more slide show, much cheaper pekelach. I never really spent money on invitations — even for the first two, I think I just made phone calls. For the past three we sent out invitations on WhatsApp. We never bought outfits for an upsheren and never paid for a photographer. Food is probably about $150 to $200-ish.