(WHTM)– If you live near a Jewish family or a synagogue you might have seen something that looks like a square tent go up in recent days.

It’s the Jewish holiday of “Sukkot,” and the square tent or hut with a thatched roof in our backyard is a sukkah.

Here were the kids and teachers at Silver Academy, the local Jewish day school, decorating the school’s sukkah. So what do the holiday and the sukkah itself, the hut, symbolize? A middle school student who knows more than I do told me there are two answers.

“One opinion is the sukkah represents the clouds that protected the Jews in the desert,” seventh-grade student Ziva Sofian said. “And the other opinion is, it represents the actual huts that the Jews lived in while traveling through the desert.”

“I love being able to go see all my friends in the sukkah and being able to go on the sukkah hop and just be able to do so many fun things,” another seventh-grade student McKenna Konowitch said. “Sometimes we even sleep in our sukkah.”

You heard her say “sukkah hop,” which is kind of like a pub crawl complete with a bottle of wine there for after work. People go from one sukkah to the next, they make a little toast, have something to eat, and move on to the next one. We’re gonna eat some meals in our sukkah.

Sukkot lasts eight days.