I feel like as much as men grumble about having to build a sukkah, we do enjoy the part where we get to figure out new improvements to make to our sukkahs every year, and when they don’t work out, we get to figure out how to do it differently for next year. It’s a never-ending mitzvah!

Guys are always thinking about how to improve their sukkah. If you ever see a man stop learning and stare into space for several moments before coming back down to earth, he just had a thought about how to improve his sukkah.

I actually made a major improvement to my sukkah last year, in a way that makes it 100% more Mehadrin than ever: I finally got Mehadrin straps. When you’re not very handy, your improvements are a lot less impressive.

Okay, it occurs to me that people who have sukkahs with solid walls that don’t move when a butterfly sneezes might not know what Mehadrin straps are.

Mehadrin straps are for when you have a sukkah that’s really not Mehadrin in any way, so the straps make the walls better halachically but also raise a lot of questions in the minds of your guests that lead to good but repetitive conversation fodder for the seudos.

Basically, it’s three or four straps that go around the lower half of a canvas sukkah. It uses the halacha of lavud to create a second layer of wall that, although it looks less protective than the walls you already have that are swaying in the wind, it is actually halachically superior and you can technically maybe just use those and not the wall that is swaying in the wind, except that no one will eat in your sukkah.

Nobody asks why your house has two layers of wall.

It’s weird that my sukkah didn’t come with those, right?

Not for the price I paid.

I bought my sukkah a bunch of years ago, when it didn’t look like we were going away for Sukkos one year because we were expecting.

It was an impulse purchase.

We got it for $25 at a moving sale. Turns out that the cheapest way to buy a sukkah is to find someone who’s moving to another country, such as England, and is not in the mood to figure out how to transport an entire portable house with them. We got what some retailers call an E-Z sukkah. In America, anyway. I think in England, it would be pronounced “E-Zed sukkah,” which makes no sense. Could be that’s why they sold it.

But the walls were definitely flappier than they should have been. When I put the sukkah together, I discovered that the tarps that it came with were not originally manufactured as part of the sukkah. They were just tarps. Of different colors and sizes. Some taller than the sukkah and some shorter. And there was a shower curtain too, for some reason. That was supposed to go over the doorway, I think. And if you think a tarp blows back and forth when it’s tied from above and below—particularly the tarps that are taller than the sukkah—a shower curtain is not tied below even a little bit. It just blows seven feet straight into your sukkah.

Anyway, I figured that some kind of lavud strap system had to exist, because there were narrow slots on the poles for something to run through, but all of the local sukkah stores are closed on Sukkos, apparently. So as soon as Chol Hamoed hit, I went out to Home Depot and presented our shayla to the salespeople.

No, I’m just kidding. I bought a rope that was 150 feet long, and with the help of my father-in-law, I ran it around the sukkah several times and tied it down.

And ever since then, we’ve been living with the rope. Every year, it takes about a half hour to put up our walls, and then three hours to take this 150-foot string, get out all the knots that it makes in itself over the course of the year, and then thread all 150 feet through every single narrow strap slot, one at a time, fighting the constant snagging, the rope creating new knots in itself and every person who tries to help us always somehow standing on the rope.

We did make improvements over the years. For example, one thing we did was buy official nylon walls from our local sukkah outlet. This came with a zipper on the door instead of a billowing shower curtain, and some fake windows we could close if we wanted to keep bugs out, and it has Kiddush printed on the wall in case I want to make Kiddush facing away from my family. And on the opposite wall, it has Ushpizin in the wrong nusach, because I did not think to ask. But hopefully, this new set of walls would not blow as much.

I’m not sure it helped.

So finally this year, we buckled and bought straps. Which is when we found out that they’re officially called “Mehadrin straps.” Mehadrin is an adjective that can mean pretty much anything, apparently. The Mehadrin of it is that until now, 90% of our time dealing with our E-Z sukkah was fighting with the string. But now, we can spend 90% of it figuring out how to fold a 44-foot nylon with brachos on it.

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He has also published eight books and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].