Years ago I was at a Rosh Hashanah meal where each person had their own little seder plate with the holiday’s symbolic foods on it and we said prayers over each food before sampling them. It was the first time I’d seen it and always wanted to do it at my own table, but my schedule was always too frantic and it was regulated to my  “maybe next year I’ll try it…” list.

I had a little more holiday prep time than usual this year since I didn’t have any special High Holiday issue of the newspaper to work on or any early deadlines for next week’s issue so I thought I’d give it a try.

The symbolic foods are:

Dates, white beans, leek (I used green onion because the store was out of leeks), beets, gourd (I used butternut squash because I found a pre-cut package at Costco), apples with honey, pomegranate and a ram’s head.

Since ram’s heads are not easy to come by (nor would I want one on my table), I tried to find gummy fish, which is what the family used those years ago at their table (fish heads are also a symbolic food – may we be a head and not a tail). But I couldn’t find kosher gummy fish, so I opted to design the plate with a symbolic ram’s head instead.

Besides the apples and honey, which I didn’t place directly on it, here’s what our first Rosh Hashanah seder plate looked like:

(I never claimed to be good at crafts. ) For more details about the foods and the prayers, visit chabad.org.

Wishing everyone a happy, healthy, successful and sweet new year!