What to Do on Yet Another Boston Snow Day? Bake Hamantashen!

It’s snowing—again—in Boston, and for the Ciment family, that means it’s time for “Mommy Camp.” On today’s agenda: morning prayers, baking, arts-and-crafts and more.

“Every couple of days, we have another snowstorm. There’s one snow day after another, so we are having a lot of mommy time, mommy school and mommy camp,” explains Leah Rochel Ciment, the mother of four children—three boys and one girl, ages 1 month to 5 years old.

Across Boston, winter-weary residents are trying to find creative ways to spend their time indoors as the precipitation continues to fall down and pile up. According to the National Weather Service, since Dec. 1, the city has received more than 90 inches of snow—with most of that coming in the past few weeks—and unusually bitter-cold temperatures.

Schools across the city have used up all of their allotted snow days and will have to figure out a way to make up the missed class time. Business have seen a significant downturn in sales, with losses closing in on $1 billion, according to news reports, including the amount of revenue lost for employees who couldn’t make it into work because of road conditions and, during one of the storms, the suspension of public transportation.

To that end, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh has urged residents to support local businesses. He even tweeted a picture of himself on Tuesday afternoon visiting a local bakery to pick up some pastries.

But on the individual level, the focus for many is what to do with the little ones, day after day.

“The biggest challenge is having everybody home for multiple days,” says Ciment, who along with her husband, Rabbi Yaakov Ciment, are administrators at the New England Hebrew Academy in Brookline, Mass. “You have to have some structure, making sure everyone is getting along and being entertained. You want them to be happy … I don’t want them to feel cooped up inside.

“Every day should be something productive and exciting for the kids,” she adds. “That’s the main thing.”

Scheduling and Rescheduling

And so, Ciment has turned her home into a mini-camp, complete with daily activity lists and special projects. Each day starts with tefillah (the recitation of morning prayers) and then an activity—from already starting to bake hamantashen for Purim to making arts-and-crafts projects. Then there’s lunch, naptime, story time and more.

“Since we don’t have a lot of interaction outside” and can’t always go visit other people, “we try and come up with activities that involve others, she says, like making shalach manot packages for Purim, or writing a letter or ‘thank you’ notes.”

Those notes are being “written” by 3-year-old Hillel, who recently had his upsherin—his very first haircut and accompanying ceremony.

It’s a festivity that took months of planning; then, explains Ciment, “there was a blizzard on the day of the upsherin, “so while we cut his hair, we had to postpone the party. We finally had it about a week-and-a-half ago.”

As for all the days off, Ciment insists it’s not something taken lightly by officials at the New England Hebrew Academy. However, she adds, “a lot of teachers and students have a long commute from other parts of Massachusetts or Rhode Island, and that has to be taken into account. We can have the school opened, but classes will have no teachers or just one or two students.”

In fact, the weather may dictate some end-of-the-year scheduling changes.

“We are having an administrative meeting to see how we will make up the missed days,” says Ciment. “I don’t know if we’ll extend the school year, but we don’t have too many other upcoming vacations other than Passover, and that, of course, won’t work” in terms of cutting that break short.

Even if they do have to go well into June, at least one thing will resolve: the weather should cooperate.