For those of you wondering where the blog has been the last two days, Monday night was the start of an 8-day Jewish Festival known as Sukkot (most of the Christian world knows it as the Feast of Tabernacles, which isn't quite the same thing). There's a fall harvest component to the holiday, but the main thrust of it is the booths, or Sukkot, that Jews build to eat and spend time in during the holiday. It's dark now, of course, but I'll get my own sukkah pictures up tomorrow.
The other main symbols are the lulav and the etrog. The lulav is a bundle of myrtle, willow, and a palm frond, while the etrog is a more-or-less-inedible citrus, apparently only grown in Israel. Most of the palms come from Egypt for some reason. Now, the palms in southern California and Arizona are, in fact, Kosher for Festival Use, and to the best of my knowledge, the country also has some areas that do fairly well in producing citrus. So why on earth someone hasn't put together a local business growing these things is beyond me. There's a market of at least several hundred thousand for the etrogs, and there's only a palm tree on every other corner in LA, SD, and Phoenix.
