Maxie and I visited Sukkah City in Union Square yesterday. Sukkah City = super-cool arty Sukkah design competition. (As some of you know, our Sukkah is prefab but personalized by gazillions of glittery little-girl princess necklaces, plastic leis and hideous freebie necklaces Jonathan brought back for the girls from trade shows. See above.)

Anyway, you can read my not-at-all-opinionated thoughts on each Sukkah City sukkah on my Flickr page. Loved some, didn’t love some. (And to my surprise, Maxie and I had the same favorite. You done good if you can appeal to a five-year-old and a middle-aged cynic still in recovery from Jewish Day School.) It was lovely seeing such a spectrum of New Yorkers — old and young, Black and white and Asian and Latino, dressed in miniskirts and tank-tops and in tzniyusdik Haredi garb — checking out the sukkot and voting for their faves.

Overheard:

1. Fratty dude on cell phone, striding by the exhibit without really looking: “DUDE, it is SO CRAZY, there are, like, WOODEN HOUSES all over the place — DUDE!” (Maxie: “I don’t think that guy is Jewish.”)

2. The Chabad folk are ON IT. Within moments of our arrival one Chabadnik invited Maxie to a sukkah-decorating party, and we spotted a guy dressed as the Twitter logo, in a big fuzzy blue bird suit. (He was encouraging people to tweet about Sukkot. Or Sukkos, in bird language.) Maxie fearlessly ran over to shake his wing (as five-year-olds who were weaned on Disney World because their aunt used to work for the Maus and got them discounted tickets are wont to do), and he said, “Happy Sukkos.” She looked back at him, unsure of how to respond. I prompted, “Say ‘Happy Sukkot’ back.” The bearded rebbe standing next to the bird said with a smile, “I suppose this is more a ‘Happy Sukkot’ crowd than a ‘Happy Sukkos’ crowd.” Indeed.

Email me if you need me to explain the humor in this to you, my goyishe friends.

And here’s a story from last year about how we spent $25 of Tablet magazine’s money at the dollar store to decorate the sukkah, augmenting the tacky necklace collection with super-easy craft projects and glitter skulls. Everyone loves a glitter skull.