The real reason why Israel takes Hol HaMoed off as a holiday is in fact because, when your seder ends at 4am and you don’t get home ’till 6am and then you sleep on and off ’till 3pm (and thus are awake the following 4am), you realize that you’re gonna need a whole dang week to get your body clock back on some sort of respectable schedule.
That, and, of course, it’s Hol HaMoed, duh.
Oogh. Some of us are simply not intended to be nocturnal people.
Yes, also not a night person. Seder, though lovely, kicked my butt, sleep schedule-ly speaking. M is discovering how important it is to get me to bed on time. 🙂
Seders with kids, my wife and I are discovering, are a whole different kind of animal. Now, instead of emulating the rabbis who stayed up all night retelling the story (until their students came in, etc etc), we have a very experiential seder with costumes and a fake red sea and pyramid-building relays… as if we were slaves in Egypt says the Haggadah, right? I’ll tell you what — it doesn’t go to 4 am anymore!
Oh, no, this was a seder with loooots of kidlings, aged anywhere from 6months on up. They just ran around until they had no more running in them (we managed to do both grownup Torah seder and crazy kid activity seder at the same time, somehow), and then crashed when they had to crash. The living room was littered with little sleeping people by the end.