Once upon a time, when we were children, everything was very simple:
A few weeks before a family wedding, we would stand in a line of family members, squeeze into Dad's Fiat 127, and, driving slowly in the sauna bath, we would take off towards the Old City of Jerusalem.
There, in the Old City of Jerusalem, there was another organized parking lot (or in other words: park wherever you want), and in a long line (of three naughty boys), Mother Duck would march us towards Abu Nabil's luxurious (not really) suit boutique.
Abu Nabil, who was already a kind old man and did not suffer from 6/6 vision, would measure us for hours - and at the end of the measurements, he would choose fabric for us to sew the suit.
The fabric inventory he had in the store ranged in color from checkered brown to shocking gray.
But we, as children of the past, were content and happy. Even when a week later we came to try on the suits and the only thing we thought about was: "How on earth did the shoulder pad of the suit get inserted under the fabric in a diagonal way that made us look like astronauts at NASA?".
This year's wedding gift project was also fun, heartwarming, and full of exhausting search expeditions, at the end of which we would come away with an annual variety of wedding gifts (or in other words: a new Soda Stream without the need for a balloon).
The weddings themselves were "grand" and usually took place in abandoned complexes that were used as garages during the day and weddings at night. In our best clothes, we would eat the wedding appetizer (in other words: borax boats with mushroom sauce), and run around looking for spare car parts in the back parking lot of the "grand" hall.
At the end of the wedding, we were led with admonitions to the traditional family studio photo, with the groom standing in the middle of the photo, slightly in front of the shocking brown background with psychedelic paintings, wearing the same Abu Nabil suit, the same diagonal shoulder pad, and with a look that said: "The wedding of the year, the wedding of the year, that's how my wedding was.".
The modest and pious bride is also dressed in a wedding dress, the same wedding dress her grandmother wore when she got married in Bialystok/Warsaw (tradition, tradition is something that has sustained the Jewish people throughout the generations), and so the bride posed for the wedding photo, graceful, shy, and excited as if it were a photo from the President's residence with members of the Knesset after the formation of a new government.
On the way back home, in the sauna bath, we were excited, happy and smiling, and already dreaming of the next luxurious wedding.
But today everything is so different:
Two months before the family wedding and immediately after the engagement ceremony, you go to the bank nearest your home and fill out a form to obtain a mortgage. In the form, you list the summary of expenses and the purpose of the loan (family wedding), and this is what the form looks like:
A round of clothes shopping in New York with the wife and children - 30,000 NIS (including flights, it's literally free in my opinion).
Studio photography including a hover camera at a boutique hotel, including a dressing room - 15,000 NIS (until the children agree to dress nicely, we won't have a studio?!)
And finally, in the last section, the million dollar question - a gift for the young couple - 3,500 NIS (they only brought us 2,000, but we are Ashkenazim, Largim).
We went completely crazy. We lost the joy of life, every wedding became a military operation, at the end of which the Ministry of Finance refuses to fund our preparations for the next wedding (an excessive waste of financial resources).
A wedding gift squeezes money out of us, and creates a crater in our bank account due to an overdraft (the Israeli recipe for looking good, even when you have nothing).
And no, I didn't mention the young couple and their parents who arrive at their wedding bleary-eyed and don't even notice the sushi stands, Thai, Georgian, Circassian, and Scandinavian food, without which, and without the clothes of Italian designers, no joy is complete.
Let's go back to the childhood of old, a childhood of innocence, purity, and contentment with little.
And beautiful one hour earlier.
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