FREE Printable Pesach “Chad Gadya” Masks & Tunes

Hand-drawn by my friend Shira, these are ten simple masks (only 4 shown here) that you can print out and have your kids colour. 

(the tunes I mentioned are not printable, but you can scroll down to find links)

She plans to have hers laminated once they’re coloured, and then the kids can keep them from one seder to the next (a good use for lamination, in my opinion, as opposed to many of those throwaway projects you wish were not encased in plastic.

• To download these and hundreds of other Limudei Kodesh (Jewish) printables – including weekly parsha copywork and holiday resources, click here.  (search for “masks”)
• For General Studies printables, including science, art and music resources in Hebrew and English, Ambleside, composer and artist resources, click here.

These masks bear an eerie similarity to the colourful foam masks we actually do use already, which are sort of like these, but a bit different…  and I do have to add here – I don’t feel we NEED these at the seder, and most of us (I think) kind of resent them. 

I mean, here you are, 3 minutes away from going home, at 2 in the morning, and all of a sudden, out come the masks and in comes the bickering over who’s going to be which “character.” in the 3-minute song.

Oh, and by “bickering,” I mean teenagers and adults alike (those who are still physically present at this point in the festivities) muttering, “just sing it already, I don’t want to be anything” and me insisting, “no, you have to be something.” 

And then yelling at everybody to remember their “role” for the 3 minutes that the song lasts, when everybody, including me, would much rather be anywhere else at that particular moment.

And yet… the sweetness of the seder.  I hope, living in a land where there is only one seder, we will come to appreciate its sweet fleetingness that much more.

Because you only get so many seders, and really – is there so much harm in wanting to draw it out 5 minutes longer, if it means five more minutes with the people you love?

The first year my father did the seder (the full halachic shindig in Hebrew – he’d been doing a seder for years) was a big concession on their part and my part and a huge learning curve for all of us.  He, who grew up speaking Yiddish, not Hebrew, started practicing in January, and did the whole thing at great, painful length in Hebrew.  And at the end, after Chad Gadya, he turned the page and offered to begin Shir Hashirim (which is printed in the haggadah because some people have the minhag to say it afterwards).

And I assured him that he did NOT need to begin Shir Hashirim, which would have been agonizing for all of us.

Still – forget what I said earlier: grab some masks, draw out your Chad Gadya and enjoy.

If you need tunes, this free-to-listen album on the FAUJSA site* has 4.  I got the 4th one stuck in my head years ago and every once in a while, it pops back up:  “chaddi-gaddi-gaddi-ya!”

* What’s FAUJSA?  Only one of my favourite “tunes” resources:  the Florida Atlantic University online Jewish music archive.  They’re highlighting a bunch of free-to-listen Pesach music (cannot be downloaded that I know of), including this album.  I won’t try to point you to all of my favourites, but this month, a few good ones have even been bumped up to the front page, so do check it out!

p.s. More free-to-listen Pesach music here at Israel National Radio’s Jukebox page.  Again, this is streaming music which cannot be downloaded through legitimate means (though if a file or two happens to be hiding in your cache when you’re finished enjoying the music, there is very little to stop you from renaming it with an mp3 extension and listening to it again and again… which I didn’t tell you).