Some people prefer not to decorate their sukkah at all, concerned that the decorations shouldn’t detract from the Mitzvah’s simplicity. But others embellish their Sukkah with dazzling displays and creative themes.

Sukkah by the Sea
You live among the Kansas cornfields, miles from a beach, but you can create a sukkah with a sea-side feeling. Use crisp nylon for sides, with cool blues and greens against white for nautical contrast. Add the sway of dreamy Chinese lanterns and beachcomber shells, and you’ll almost smell the salt air.

Pampas or ornamental grasses outside your sukkah create a beachy mood. Use tiki torches to welcome your guests at night. Tie your entrance flap for a casual elegance. Use hurricane globes to protect your candles from the wind. An inch or two of sand or seashells around the candles look great. Hot glue beautiful shells or whimsical sailboat buttons or ceramic starfish to plain napkin rings.

The possibilities for walls are endless. If you’re a fan of Japanese décor, the look of shoji screens can be cleverly copied with opaque fiberglass walls. This means that the look is rice paper, yet the sukkah is waterproof. Clear plastic sheeting is inexpensive and gives your sukkah a greenhouse look. If you have access to woods with twigs and limbs, you can create a wonderful Adirondack twig-style sukkah.

Over the Top
Your sukkah’s crowning touch, the ‘schach’ on top, is the crucial part of the mitzvah. The ‘schach’ covering recreates our ancestors’ temporary shelters in the hasty Exodus, so avoid nails, staples or man-made materials on the roof.

‘Schach’ can be cut from the ground, or bamboo mats and poles can be ordered through a Judaica shop from NYC’s many seasonal sukkah outlets that ship anywhere.

Bamboo sticks or specially made rollup mats give your sukkah a rustic, island look. Bamboo poles store easily along a basement or garage wall with simple bicycle brackets. If you live in a condo or apartment with limited storage, the woven mats roll up and store neatly. The mats also add a clean uncluttered almost Japanese-screen flavor.

As an alternative, try heaping pine boughs over your roof. The sharp spicy scent of pine is as lovely as the languid, armloads of greenery hanging over the sukkah sides. In a warmer climate, palm fronds are a cool, striking way to cover your roof without blocking the stars.

Building a Sukkah
Be brave. Your first sukkah is the most daunting. Next year you may find that you’d like to expand, relocate your sukkah- it’s fairly easy to adapt. You can order a prefab canvas or nylon sukkah from a company specializing in easy-up sukkahs, but building your own is more satisfying. Don’t be shy. Get a neighbor or a friend to help. If you have the design and they have the know-how, it’s a creative combination.

Save your New Year’s cards from friends- cover with clear contact paper to protect from the rain and hang with yarn. Create fruit and spice ropes intertwined with small terra-cotta flowerpots for a French country cottage look. Hang bunches of dried flowers and herbs upside down from the roof- elegant, updated natural materials for a lasting impression. Snip tin stars, suns, and moons, decorated with punchwork, for a celestial theme.

Most important, share the fun and creativity with your loved ones. These lovely rituals create the treasured heirlooms passed through the generations.

Wall-to-Wall for One and All
Mitzvah specifications generally fit to a person’s measurements. The Tefillin, for instance, must properly fit our head size; it cannot be too small, or too big.

The sukkah has a minimum height: under 40 inches it's not a "dwelling" but a crawl space. It can’t be too high either. The sukkah is supposed to be a "temporary dwelling," so a sukkah with a ceiling over 30 feet is not deemed temporary.

Jewish law specifies the sukkah's minimum length and width, its minimum number of walls, the maximum area allowing gaps in the walls, under the walls and above the walls.

Sections of the Talmudic tractate Sukkah and corresponding chapters of the Code of Jewish Law read more like a builder's manual than a religious text.

But there’s no limit to a sukkah's length and breadth. Theoretically, you can build a sukkah the size of a city and it is still a kosher sukkah.

The Talmud derives this from a Torah verse that "it is fitting for all of Israel to dwell in a single sukkah" The Lubavitcher Rebbe shows how this amazing girth expresses a Sukkah’s essence.

Each festival imbues us with a particular spiritual quality: freedom on Passover, wisdom on Shavuot. On Sukkot our interdependence and unity as a people is expressed by uniting the Four Kinds of Etrog, Lulav, Myrtle and Willow, and by the sukkah's general embrace of every type of Jew.

It is most "fitting that the entire people of Israel dwell in a single sukkah." A sukkah large enough to house all Jews is its most fitting expression.

Practically, we construct smaller sukkot. But whatever size sukkah we build, let’s think of it as a big all-welcoming sukkah.