I would love to hear your comments, here on my blog, or on the photos themselves, which ones are your favourites; whether you like or dislike any in particular; whether you think some should be incldued from my other photos that weren’t.

So go check them out and let me know…

As the Yiddish name “Hamentaschen” (hamentashen, hamantaschen, hamantashen, homentaschen, homentashen, hamentash, hamantasch, etc…) suggests, these are an exclusive tradition of European Ashkenazi Jewry, and yet they have been borrowed into Israeli (and thus international Jewish) culture as “אוזני המן” (Oznei Haman, “Haman’s ears”). It might seem predictable enough for something named after the infamous Book of Esther character Haman to become part of the Purim tradition, but it’s not quite so simple…

[ A survey, or: primary school's lasting impact. | "Hamentaschen", the word. | "Oznei Haman", the Israeli take. | Haman's ears? | Or his hat...? | ... And nursery rhymes... | Where are you, o sweet filling? | Trinity? Are you serious?! | Or fertility? | "It's a yummy snack!" | Poppy seeds (mmm... opium). ]

A survey, or: primary school’s lasting impact.

The best reason I remember being taught regarding the Hamentaschen’s connection to Purim was that it was modelled after Haman’s three-cornered hat. Knowing that was an unlikely story, and that (as shown below) the word doesn’t originally have to do with Haman, I decided to ask people why they thought the two were connected. Most respondents claimed their highest level of education on the subject was elementary or middle school.

• One answered by pointing to his own and saying “Haman’s ears”;
• Or that Haman wore a hat with three corners;
• Rachel K at first suggested that they have three sides, like the trinity;
• but because she was clearly kidding, then suggested it was a fertility symbol, basing her answer on the time of year and what the thing looks like (use your imagination);
• One Chasidic solution was offered, suggesting that the food represented the concealed and the revealed;
• Rachel G: “It’s a yummy snack, and we like to put it in our baskets”;
• Many decided it was pretty arbitrary, and some compared it to latkes. Allison thinks every holiday needs a special food, which was particularly evident when she sang a song with those words while acting as a latka (“I had the cutest costume”) in Grade 4.

But even latkas and doughnuts can be explained for Chanukkah as having plenty of oil, which play a major role in that festival. The Hamentaschen, on the other hand, is completely inexplicable… nearly.

“Hamentaschen”, the word.

It seems that everyone agrees on the origin of the word “Hamentaschen” having nothing to do with Haman (הָמָן) but rather “mon” (מאָן), the Yiddish word for poppy-seeds. “Tasch” is similarly a German word meaning “pocket”, a cognate of “task” and “tax” (see Balashon on the topic). If so, once it gained enough support as a recipe, the poppies were replaced by assorted other fillings, and, fortifying a relationship between the snack and the festival, “mon” became “Homon” (“Haman” in an Askhenazi pronunciation). [Balashon suggests the "ha-" added is the definite article in Hebrew, but this seems unlikely as Yiddish uses German determiners, and because that too is different to "ho" (הַ vs. הָ). I think it is more arbitrary.]

So we need to then ask: was the cookie invented, and someone said: “Hey! That sounds like Haman! We should call them ‘Hamentaschen’ and eat it on Purim!”, or was it first made as a Purim snack, and then attached to Haman? Either way, it seems the stories associating the pastry with Haman’s ears or hat must have come later. Or, according to 123holiday.net, it is just about eating Haman and has little to do with hats and ears: “It is a mitzvah to devour Haman with open mouth.” To my knowledge this mitzvah isn’t codified in any compendia of Halakha. I have a feeling this too is an apocryphal addition to the custom.

Another interesting feature of this name is that most English (Yinglish) speakers will call the biscuits “Hamentaschen”, even in singular, when it would be grammatically correct in Yiddish to call them “Hamentasch”. I checked with someone whose mame loshen (“mother tongue”) is Yiddish, and they confirmed that they would only ever refer to “Hamentasch” if singular and “Hamentaschen” for plural. This “-en” for plurals is also used in some older English words, such as ox >> oxen. But clearly English speakers don’t see that; I have come to usually use the plural in both cases. Others have claimed to hear “Hamentaschens” which is just going too far for me.

“Oznei Haman”, the Israeli take.

The decision to make the translation into Hebrew as “Haman’s ears” is curious. I tried looking it up in Klein’s etymological dictionary to no avail. But why didn’t they name them “Haman’s pockets” (כיסי המן) in translation of the Yiddish? It’s possible—following a short comment on Wikipedia, but not confirmed by anyone I’ve spoken to—that an alternative Yiddish name was “Hamanohren”, and that the Hebrew name was taken from this Yiddish tradition. Even so, I guess the affinity to ears instead of pockets could be taken from how the pastries look: a little like ears, with flaps coming up on three sides. Still, if anyone can explain how Modern Hebrew chose this name, I would appreciate knowing!

Haman’s ears?

Had it not been for the Israeli term probably being earlier, I would have expected the “it looks like Haman’s pointy ears” excuse to be an effect of Star-Trek, and even then Spock is a good character. Did the name come first, describing how the pastries looked, and only then the attachment as Haman’s ears, or the other way around? I have failed to find any portraits of a Haman with pointy or three-cornered ears.

And assuming that this reason was correct, is that apricot jam filling meant to be ear-wax? After all, Haman didn’t have Q-tips (thanks Avraham).

I’m not so sure how I feel about sending my friends some evil guy’s ears to eat. After we hang him and his sons, do we lop off his ears for a little cannibalistic fun? One web site nearly seems to think so. According to one uncited midrash, Haman entered the king’s chambers, bent forward, with head uncovered and his ears “מקוטפות” — plucked? (I have a feeling I haven’t read this quite right). The same site provides another explanation: that Haman’s ears were chopped off before his hanging! A little cruel and unusual, and again with no source given.

There is another uncited midrash that a friend told me, that Mordecai and Haman looked alike (a strange theme of Purim regards equating the chief personalities of good and evil present in the story of Esther). If so, why would we be representing Haman’s ears (or hat) and not the good guy’s?

Or his hat…?

Nearly everyone—Orthodox, Reform and Conservative—seems to think that we eat Hamentaschen because they look like Haman’s hat. Finally we all agree on something. If only it made an iota of sense.

I thought I would see what historical artists had to say about this suggestion. Within the world of biblical art, we get three major portrayals of Haman: (a) leading Mordecai on the king’s horse; (b) being accused by Esther; (c) hanging on gallows (with or without his ten sons). Illuminated manuscripts may carry many more scenes. Let’s take a walk through history and see what we find:

• Dura Europos: Some of the earliest known Jewish paintings (3rd century) include a depiction of a bare-headed Haman leading Mordecai. (a)
• Numerous German manuscripts from the 12th and 13th century (in Hourihane, ed., Between the picture and the word) depict the hanging of Haman and his sons—some bare-headed, some blindfolded, some indeed with hats, but no triangles. (c)
• A French-Christian 13-14th century mss. has Haman either hanging bare-headed or with a cloth covering, but certainly a blindfold. (c)
• One from 14th Century England also has him bare-headed. (c)
• Michaelangelo’s 16th century depiction has him on the gallows, not only bare-headed but bare-bodied. (c)
• A 1616 illuminated manuscript has Haman wearing something a little turban-like, although it seems as if the artist did not have much experience depicting turbans. It has a feather in it, no less.
• The 1660 Dutch work of Jan Steen seems to have Haman in a three-cornered woollen/fur hat. (b)
• Rembrandt (1665) has Haman honouring Modrecai (a) in a large wrapped turban, as he is in another Rembrandt work. (b)
• In a 1673 illuminated scroll offered to a Romanian hierarch, Haman and all his sons wear turbans.
• An 18th century Jewish French picture shows, indeed, a tricorn hat on Haman. But so has Mordecai. Sort of. His hat is a little overblown. (a)
• A late 18th century Grace After Meals manuscript has Haman with a feather in his hat, which seems to be round, but could possibly be three-cornered. (a)
• I would love to see the 18th century manuscript mentioned here but held in Tel Aviv in which “There are scenes of baroque buildings and genteel characters in typical 18th-c. dress; even Haman’s sons hang in droll positions from the gallows,” but it would cost me $3995 to order a copy in from London.
• Gustave Doré of 19th century France shows a turban. (b)
• English painter Ernest Normand (1859-1923) shows bearded Haman with cloth wrapped around his forehead. (b)
• An artist whose name I can’t identify shows most of the headwear metal and jewelled. (b)

Admittedly, the cases where Haman is being hanged could be excluded, as I know little about the headwear policies on the gallows of ancient Persia; the 1997 copy of a 1616 manuscript in McGill’s Rare Books collection gave Haman a hat but removed it when hanging. Maybe it would also be correct to exclude the Christian depictions for this study, but in all fairness, both support my hypothesis equally well:

The tricorn hat (which the Hamentaschen does resemble) is a feature of late-17th to 18th century Europe, worn as military as well as civilian dress. Among the artwork reviewed, the only clear tricorn hats appear unsurprisingly in this period, with one more ambiguous case also falling out in the late 18th century. It is definitely not a common depiction of Haman’s hat, and logically it shouldn’t be, as if I am not mistaken, those of the East (including Persia) have long preferred cloth over hard, brimmed or fur hats.

And so we see that essentially all the illustrations portray their characters either in the familiar outfits of the artist’s time and place (three-corners, feathered-hats, etc.), or attempt to provide an appropriate cultural frame by making assumptions about dress in the Persian empire (turbans).

What about how Haman is depicted in more recent illustrations? I looked up a few online Hamans, and found that some take the turban approach (shemayisrael, Aish, and possibly holidays.net although their picture is just strange). Others clearly give his hat three points: chagim.org.il/amit.org.ail, Chabad.org, and possibly Artscroll whose hat shape in the samples is ambiguous, but adds a feather. Torah Tots has something a little strange on their Haman’s head: they seem to have gotten the whole idea of a triangular hat confused and stood it upwards, looking appropriate for an early kibbutz. And one feminist Purim Spiel masquerades Haman in mercenary outfit complete with tricorn headwear.

So how did this late 17th—early 18th century hat make it into our primary schools? I have not yet found a source that identifies when Hamentaschen were invented, but to someone who lived in the company of tricorn hats, folding up three sides of a round pastry may bear strong resemblance. Drawing the same connection at a later period may even have been possible.

One Israeli web site suggests another reason: the hats, once worn by feared army officers in Eastern Europe (were they?), later became a symbol of anti-Semitism. As such, it was only a logical step to connect the hat, the lookalike cookie with Haman’s name (or something like it), and Haman the primeval anti-Semite.

It is still strange to stick sweet stuff inside this guy’s hat and give it to my friend to eat on the holiday… Not as strange as ears, but getting there.

… And nursery rhymes…

For some reason I always associated this supposed three-pointed hat with the song Hakova sheli shalosh pinot (“My hat has three corners”) which we were also taught in primary school. I don’t know whether they were taught together, or whether it was just an intricate and inseverable connection forged in my own mind. But we find it as a German nursery rhyme too (but a different tune)! Indeed, all of the following have been sung by children:

I would guess Modern Hebrew is probably the only Semitic language with a translation of this European folk song (correct me if I’m wrong!). Of course, no Jewish day-school student learning this song in Hebrew class was ever told that it wasn’t invented by Jews. It seems instead (sorry to burst bubbles) that it was just one of those things that the Zionists found too important to leave behind in Europe. (Or maybe it was a necessary part of what it meant to have a sovereign nation-state with its own historical language.)

Presumably, this song too goes back to the turn of the 18th century, when people had hats that, had they not three corners, would not be their hats!

Where are you, o sweet filling?

The usual Chasidic take on anything related to the story of Esther is to bring out a contrast between the hidden and the revealed. It works a little like this: there is a concept of God hiding His face (and thus allowing the world to operate unguided). And yet at times God’s hand is still present in the world. As such, God remains unmentioned in the Book of Esther, but nonetheless His miracle is revealed on a grand scale. The book is called Megillat Esther (“The Scroll of Esther”), where it might otherwise have been named after another character or been called “Sefer” (book) or “Toledot” or something else. So, they say: the root g.l.l (גל”ל) of “megillah” is like g.l.h (גל”ה) of “revealed”, while “Esther” (אסתר) is remarkably similar to Hebrew hester (הסתר) meaning “hiding” (despite hers undoubtedly being a Persian name, with a meaning more like more like “star”; we are given another name (הדסה) for her in Hebrew).

In the same vein the Hamentaschen reveals just a small portion of its filling (read: God’s hand), while the remainder is hidden beneath lips of dough, just as Esther’s identity and God’s miracle were hidden in Shushan. But while it’s fair enough to add deeper meaning to the cookie, especially when every feature of the festival is typologically associated with this dualistic concept, it’s not reasonable (in my opinion) to expect someone to invent the delicacy for this reason.

Trinity? Are you serious?!

For another religious interpretation of the image of the cookie, some Hebrew web sites I have seen have suggested that the three corners represent the three Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in whose merit the Purim salvation came. (And what about the women?) It’s not exactly the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, but in the arbitrariness of the association it might as well be.

Further, the site that first alerted me to this theory, the Israeli Education Ministry no less, loses a lot of its credibility by suggesting that “תרנגול הודו” (tarnegol hodu, “turkey fowl”) is an appropriate food for the Purim feast because the Megillah opens telling us that the king ruled from “Hodu to Kush”. Pity that “Hodu” is usually taken as India (rightly or wrongly), and this tarnegol originates in the Americas. (For a good coverage of this see Balashon Thanksgiving edition.) A silly source for a custom if you ask me: just tell the truth and say that Israel is upset to miss out on Thanksgiving and Christmas, eat the turkey, and be done with it.

Or fertility?

(This paragraph not intended for minors…) As noted above, one person suggested the Hamentaschen represented fertility, by way of its being eaten in early spring, containing seeds (or fruit) and looking akin to (I guess) some female anatomy. Now I do realise that that same part of the body is probably the most similar word in Hebrew to “pocket” (כיס). Nonetheless, there is a general approach of those being critical of a tradition to just say “we borrowed it from X”, “it’s an agricultural thing”, “it’s a pagan custom”, “it’s a fertility symbol”. That might be a sensible approach in some cases, particularly if the custom seems to be of the right age or origin, but I don’t imagine this one is. I think it’s too recent (and maybe too exclusively Jewish?) to assume that. I also don’t think that’s how people design snacks, or that there is any such sense of ritual imagery involved in the Hamentasch.

“It’s a yummy snack!”

We haven’t really found a good reason yet for the Hamentaschen’s association with Purim. It seems arbitrarily just something to eat and something easy to put in a package and send to friends. We can identify that from it have come many associations, some arguably quite absurd. Maybe it was just a popular cookie that happens to have been spread and maintained throughout the Jewish world by association with a traditional holiday?

This sort of argument might be substantiated if other European cultures ate similar three-pointed pastries. So I went searching. This web site describes the samosa as a three-cornered pastry and it seems South Africans may refer to them as drie hookie cookies (drie of course meaning three). But they are far from the same thing.

The Danish Trekantede Kager is three-cornered, but by cutting rather than folding. These 1892 lemon puffs are also triangular, but by folding a square pastry in two over the filling. Still, we’re getting closer.

And here we are. The best I could quickly find on the internet: Three-cornered Corniottes are pastries filled with ricotta cheese. This sounds right: “Place 1 tablespoon of filling in the center of the circle and turn up the edges on three sides to make a three-cornered ‘hat.’ Press the edges of the pastry firmly together at the corners so that the filling is enclosed.” In shape, the same as ours, but nowhere near as sweet (but by use of cream, just as many calories, I guess). Also, we needed something pareve (non-dairy) for our Purim feast, so this sort of thing just wouldn’t do.

So it is not entirely certain, but no one but the Jews seems to be making Hamentaschen.

Poppy seeds (mmm… opium).

Although many people nowadays dislike poppy-seed Hamentaschen and prefer other jams, it might be worth exploring them again as the original “mon” inside the “tasch”. It’s not completely unreasonable that someone invented a delicious poppy-pocket pastry and called it “montashen” and someone said, “Hey! that sounds like Haman!” and from then on the two were intricately connected by ears and hats and songs. After all, it is the holiday of being silly.

Nonetheless, they may have more significance. I had thought at first that it might be a seasonal thing. Maybe poppy seeds were produced at Purim? But no, they seem to be harvested mostly in Europe’s late Winter—early Autumn. We do know at least that they have been a popular part of European cooking, and Wikipedia goes as far as to suggest (without citation) that “some consider this cuisine tradition has Pagan roots,” presumably because of the known narcotic effects of poppy seeds.

The most convincing solution I found was dependent on the use of the poppy, but only because it was a popular seed for cooking. It also surprisingly came from Ohr Somayach: “Why poppyseeds? The Talmud states that Esther ate seeds while in the palace of Achashverosh. This enabled her to avoid non-kosher food, yet maintain a healthy appearance.” It then continues with something a little more fanciful, “Perhaps the Yiddish word ‘mon’ alludes to this, since the Hebrew word for manna, the miraculous food which sustained the Jewish people for 40 years in the dessert, is ‘mon.’”

Once you want to make a cookie with a seed filling you need some way to encase them, and folding over the edges of a pastry makes some sense.

The Encyclopedia Judaica on Purim gets halfway there: “Among the special Purim foods are boiled beans and peas, said to be a reminder of the cereals Daniel [sic] ate in the king’s palace in order to avoid any infringement of the dietary laws, and three-cornered pastries known as hamantashen (‘Haman’s ears’ [sic]).” It is strange that the encyclopaedia should make what seem like two errors without explaining the connection between Esther and Daniel, or the lack of connection between ears and taschen. The most important connection it doesn’t make (I didn’t make it either) is the one between the legumes and the pastries.

I am not sure that the solution provided by Ohr is completely convincing. But it is in my opinion the best we’ve got!

Have a Purim sameach! And enjoy your yummy hidden/fertility/patriarchal evil-person’s hat/ear/pocket snack!

So I arrived in DC on the night of Wednesday the 27th of December, 2006, off the Greyhound bus and into the care of Naomi and her family, still carrying the cookies left with me from Philadelphia. Naomi informed me that her parents had, by surprise, decided to fly her brother, David, in from Portland, Oregon, on the previous Saturday night, so the whole family would be at their home in Arlington. Although I was quite tired, Naomi’s dad took me on a sample of his nighttime tour of Washington, around the Capitol area and across the Potomac River into the state of Virginia.

Naomi had the whole trip planned out, Wednesday night through Monday when we would get on the bus back to Montreal. Thursday was allocated to the artworks of the National Gallery and the Hirshhorn, but then she realised I needed to see the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson Memorials, and we left home late, and so we lost most of the morning, and with it the Hirshhorn. The FDR Memorial is a lot less imposing than the Jefferson, or Lincoln, or Washington monuments, but is possibly more meaningful. The outdoor memorial takes one through a chronology of water, stone, copper, and words related to this innovative war and depression-time leader. From there we walked to the Jefferson, another large pillared structure, but built in a Roman style, as opposed to the Greek Lincoln and the Egyptian obelisk in Washington’s name. There we ate lunch and were collected by Naomi’s mum who would give us a tour of the National Gallery.

As an official tour guide, Florence was able to show me features of artworks that I would have passed by in the Met or MOMA or NOMA. She took us through her personal picks from the collection: a pentamento hidden under the surface; a two-sided portrait by Da Vinci; Monet’s different construction of colour; the challenge of the third dimension; socological factors in colonial American art. She left us to decide between the west wing and the Hirshhorn, both of which would give us a more contemporary image, but even then we weren’t in the west building for long before closing.

Outside, Naomi and I played around taking photos with my camera of the sunset and the mall’s buildings. Going via the closed Hirshhorn sculpture garden, and a walk through the Haupt Gardens, we caught a train back to Arlington. Dinner (the Brodkeys had made portions of their kitchen kosher/dairy for me) was eventually followed by a screening of My Fair Lady (or was that another night? I can’t remember) which had been on our movies-to-watch list for a long time. But we started it late, and Naomi slept through large portions of the movie, even though it was a favourite. As for me who had never seen it before, I only fell asleep for the last few minutes of the movie which I didn’t expect to be quite that long.

Friday morning, Naomi had decided to take me to the Washington National Cathedral. Supposedly, many think that because of it’s size and style, that the church must be Catholic. But no, it’s just big and gothic-looking. We joined a tour around the building which was the subject of preparations for former-president Gerald Ford’s funeral on the upcoming Tuesday. Many soldiers were in attendance, practising carrying coffins (with whom inside, I’m not sure), marching and the like.

From there we went to Georgetown where, having run out of time, we didn’t get to do that much. We saw the old neighbourhood a little, and I bought some Frangelico liquor for dinner that night, and soon we were on our way to meet up with Naomi’s friend Paul and his girlfriend Charlie. We ambled with them through the trendy Adams Morgan neighbourhood until we came to a large coffee shop where we couldn’t get more than a table with two chairs for the four of us. Still, the drinks were nice (something chocolate-peanut buttery for me if I recall), and the atmosphere was exciting, and the company was friendly and entertaining. But it was Friday afternoon and getting late, so we walked back to the car a little quicker than we walked from it, although I detoured via a florist.

Back home we prepared for Shabbat evening (partly by relaxing in front of the fireplace), where the family would be having Naomi’s “Dutch Uncle and Aunt”, Toto and Tata, for guests. It was a fun dinner, with good food and discussion, lots of laughter and singing, and enough alcohol to keep things light. And ice-cream with Frangelico and fig purée for dessert…

Shabbat morning was a different experience, mostly because in there being no synagogues in Arlington but the Reconstructionist Kol Ami and the Conservative Etz Hayim. I could have opted to stay at home but I instead went to check out the latter option, a short walk away, where the Brasilian Rabbi Lia lead the congregation in a discussion on the parsha. The synagogue, it seems, was on the more egalitarian side of Conservative Judaism (ie. appropriate changes to the prayer text), and of the few Conservative congregations I’ve been in (as compared to the fewer Reform congregations I’ve seen), seemed the most Reform-like. And they did a few strange things in general, like assuming there were no Kohanim present. But the kiddush afterward served as a good lunch before walking home via a playground beside a United Church around the corner from Naomi’s where we sat in a tyre and talked for a while.

The day passed and night came. A night in which we didn’t do very much, but in the end went with Naomi’s brother and his friends to a bar at which they serve beer brewed on site; I’m still not sure whether I liked my selection.

Visiting cemeteries is not something I usually do, but it’s what Naomi decided we would be doing on the Sunday. It is an interesting place to be, to see who else is wandering through the green hills filled with neatly-spaced white stones, in places distinguishable only by name, number, dates, religious icon; in places each one distinct, of character, in large, shaped granite blocks. In this major national military cemetery, the assassinated JFK is buried, along with his family including his stillborn and infant children, around an eternal flame. Another main feature is the guarded Tomb of the Unknowns, containing an unidentified soldier from each of WWI, WWII, the Korean War, and formerly Vietnam. The hourly changing of the guards is a popular and silencing choreographed sequence of precise leg movements, rifle-spins and boot-clicks.

At the top of the cemetery’s hill is the former mansion of famous Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee, known as “Arlington House“. While it and its slave quarters seem like interesting historical sites, the house was under renovation, so all the rooms were empty of their usual furnitures, with pretty pictures of what it would have looked like if they weren’t renovating.

From death, we went to life. Well only in a sense because what we went to was a Torpedo Factory, obviously in theory more about death than life. And yet it has been converted into a hub of artist studios. Painters, sculptors and various other styles of artist play with and cast their minds onto their canvas or lump of clay here on the edge of the river while you browse through their works for sale. Nothing cheap enough to actually buy, of course, but interesting enough to watch and to ask.

From there we drove to and walked through the streets of Old Town, where we disvovered the new location of a favourite shop of Naomi’s, Ten Thousand Villages, which sells the creative produce of African and other villagers for their benefit. It took a while but I was eventually tempted to buy a few things, only to discover on our way out that Montreal has one.

Finally it was New Year’s Eve. Naomi had long been despairing over whether the parties with the right groups of friends would be happening. In the end we went to two, neither of which was fantastic. The first (at someone’s house) had champagne that I didn’t drink, and friendly people, and for the first time I had the opportunity to watch the ball drop while in its own timezone, but a few peoples’ heads were in the way. Following the roll-over into the new calendar, we headed into the basement to dance, but few really did. Either way, we decided we should check out the other party of Naomi’s school friends (at another house), but that turned out to mostly have drunk guys being loud and playing exciting games like beer-pong. Not so much our scene. Although there was still somewhere else to maybe go, we were hoping to get the Hirshhorn in alongside packing on Monday, and so ended up with a short night.

Monday, of course, like all other days in my stay in Arlington, started late. Eventually we got to packing (Naomi had a lot to choose from), and I selected a few books from the shelf to help me learn French over the coming semester. The day too easily disappeared and we didn’t make it back to the mall. Save the Hirshhorn for another year.

At the Greyhound station we were twisted in long spirals of New Year’s refugees, but eventually we made it onto the bus for a night’s ride home.