Purim starts on Saturday night.

At our house, Purim really means one major thing – the Purim spiel at our synagogue, where the wife’s always one of the stars.  (She’s playing Vashti this year.)

This also means going for the Megillah reading, which can be problematic.  The Monster’s not always been one to stay in his seat through the entire affair, and in the past, I’ve resorted to bribery to keep him there.

What I’m really lacking is a good social story for the entire evening that sums up how the process works at our synagogue.  Certainly, Gateways: Access to Jewish Education has some good resources on the story and a social story for dealing with a Purim carnival.  Matan has a very useful social story for the ‘getting noisy’ part of services… but I’ve yet really to find a resource that is good for explaining when it is okay to be noisy – the Monster doesn’t necessarily pay enough attention to realize Haman’s name’s been said, or that it’s time to quiet down again to wait for the next noise-making opportunity.

So I have a project for this year – I’m going to actually build my own social story, I think, for Purim services.  I bounced this off the wife last night, and I just need to reach out today/tomorrow to the shul, but it’s based on the social story I mentioned a while back for the Autism-friendly stage performances.  For instance, our shul has been using a traffic light system (as did the one I belonged to as a child) and there’s a very clear red-green light at the front of the congregation.  Since I do the videography for the spiel anyway – Purim is not under the same no-electronic-devices rule as many other holidays – I can’t imagine it’d hurt if I did some still photography…

I mean, I can’t be the only one whose child doesn’t pay enough attention to not get the basic rules. 😉