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Published: March 30 2012

Buzz Fleischman - Columnist Page. We know that time of the year approaches because we just about trip over the big matzo and chocolate macaroons display near the front door of our local supermarket. Matzo is a Yiddish word meaning "I forgot to use the yeast". Matzo are thin, bread like crackers and the odds of buttering one without it falling to pieces are the same as a yodeler getting a good review from Simon Cowell.

Eating a sandwich made with matzo is like peanut butter and jelly without the bread. You'll never order a matzoh sandwich in the drive thru, it's as far from 'car food' as Ahmadenijad is from a high school diploma.

The Passover meal is rich in both tradition and calories. It begins with matzo ball soup. The matzo ball recipe is passed down through the generations and in some families, guarded like the President's nuclear codes briefcase. The softness or hardness of the matzo balls will determine the conversation in the car by your guests on the way home. There are three consistencies; sponge ball, volley ball and cannonball, or 'sinkers'. This year, the seven-day holiday begins at sundown April 7 th. We need 7 days because that's how long it takes a sinker to go through the digestive process. This is part of the religious symbolism of our faith because around the 4th day at sundown we raise our hands to the heavens, and cry out, "Hear me oh God, when will I pass this matzo ball?"

Everything in the Passover meal like the Gefilte fish, the lamb, bitter herbs and the chocolate is symbolic. The bitter herbs symbolize our trek through the dessert without sunblock.
Some may feel that the chocolate macaroons and chocolate covered matzo is a reward for having to partake of the bitter herbs. And then there's the Charoset. When we make the 'ch' sound, it symbolizes the amount of dairy we store in our throats.
Charoset is the thick blend of fruit and nuts symbolizing the mortar which our forefathers used to build pyramids in Egypt. You'll notice they're still standing. (See matzoh ball reference)
We mix the bitter and the sweet between a sandwich of matzoh to symbolize the feeling of the sweetness of leaving Egypt and the bitterness of paying retail for class 'A' accommodations when all we got was a tent in the desert.
Yes, Passover is a dichotomy: sweet/bitter, joy/sorrow, wholesale/retail.

When I want tears of happiness and an emotional feeling of pure joy, I'll watch 'Extreme Makeover, Home Edition'. My eyes will well up with tears as the bus pulls away and for the remainder of the show I'm as wet eyed as a professional onion peeler.
You can buy the matzo, which are shrink-wrapped 5 one pound boxes to the package. This makes it virtually impossible to buy only the one box we will use. If you know the manager of your supermarket, they will call a stock person with a Bowie knife and the arms of Schwarzenegger to cut the package open. They don't want you to buy just one!

On a graph, the matzo buying season looks like a snake with a vertical 10 foot pole stuck in it a third of the way through the year.
When the cable company makes you take channels you don't want like the Knitting Channel along with Comedy Central this is called bundling. When Manischewitz does it, it's simply called trying to sell a year's supply in one week. That's marketing.

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