Hide and Go Sleep

he ever finds is because my mother tells him where it is. His strength is that he’s more of a negotiator. So he’d sit there and bargain with my sister down to get us small presents, and then she’d get up and retrieve it. So one year, I told her where to hide it, and then I snuck away from the table and hid it somewhere else.

And the negotiations used to take hours. I’m pretty sure, looking back, that my father was trying to teach us how to negotiate, but it didn’t take. My negotiation skills are nonexistent. When someone calls me about a writing job (I’m a writer), I’m always like, “I charge X, but I can really do less.” They don’t even have to say anything. I’m very eager to please.

For the first few years of being a father, I had a seriously unfair advantage. I wanted to be an easygoing father who would get his 3-year-old an afikoman present without negotiating, but there’s nowhere he could have hid it that I wouldn’t find it. I was a reigning champion who had never had my afikoman found once – even the year I hid it right under the table. So I basically had to spend a few years pretending to look for it but purposely not finding it, especially the years that we spent the Seder at my in-laws. And the year that my kids hid it on a high shelf—Well, high for them. It was directly parallel to my face.

But now my kids are old enough to make it harder for me, and they’ve gotten to asking for things that are over our price range. “Yeah, don’t worry. We’ll put it together with tomorrow night’s present.” have any rules. Well, actually, my father had one rule: We could hide it wherever we wanted, but he wouldn’t get up to look for it. I don’t know why I kept forgetting this. I was sure I had memories of a father looking for the afikoman. It must have been someone else’s father.

So as the oldest, I used to come up with all these increasingly-elaborate hiding spots, and my father did not once get up and look. And then I would come up with something even more elaborate the next year.

For example, one year my strategy was to hide it in my bedroom at the bottom of a suit bag hanging in my closet. There is no way in a million years that he would have found that by midnight. He wasn’t even good at looking for things. Everything

And my wife goes, “Hey! Who says you get to steal it again tomorrow night?”

My wife wants to steal it tomorrow night. Sure, you can say that officially the afikoman custom is about keeping the kids awake, but maybe you also want to keep your wife awake. She’s been running nonstop. And anyway, we generally have a harder time getting the kids to go to sleep.

By Menachem Posner

1. I am the evil king whose downfall is celebrated at the Seder

A. Achashverosh

B. Antiochus

C. Pharaoh

D. King Tut

2. I’m the hero of the Exodus whose name is mentioned just once in the Haggadah

A. Moses

B. Aaron

C. Miriam

D. Izzy Finkelstein

3. I ask a blunt question and “get my teeth blunted”

A. The wise son

B. The wicked son

C. The simple son

D. The son who does not ask

4. I’m the only food on the Seder plate that isn’t eaten

A. The beitzah (“egg”)

B. The zeroa (“shankbonbe”)

C. The charoset (“paste”)

D. The marror (“bitter herb”)

5. I ask the Four Questions aloud

A. The Seder leader

B. The eldest member of the group

C. The child

D. The greatest scholar present

6. We spent an entire Seder night expounding on the story of Exodus