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Of all the wedding presents Marilyn Fine received 36 years ago, the delicate English bone-china Passover seder plate is still her most cherished gift.

“I wish I could display it all year round,” says Fine, 59, a Jewish educator from Silver Spring, Md.

It’s too big for her china cabinet, so Fine always looks forward to Passover — this year starting on the night of April 18 — so she can take it out and show it off.

Laurie Blumberg-Romero of Denver shows off the silver-and-white porcelain seder plate she received for her wedding, and also sets her Passover table with another plate that is of equal value in her eyes — the one her son made in the first grade that she says “connects him to the holiday.”

“It’s always, always on the table because it’s so cute,” says Blumberg-Romero, a 38-year-old hospital administrator.

Regardless of the design or designer — renowned artist or artistic child — one thing remains the same for each plate: a designated placeholder for each of the traditional food items necessary for telling the Passover story.

For a holiday that commands Jews to remember the ancient Israelites’. Exodus from slavery to freedom, are we free to adapt these food items to tell our own stories?

A few years ago, on a visit to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, I heard of a Jewish soldier during the Civil War who wanted to celebrate Passover but could not find suitable ingredients for making charoset. Instead of creating an edible concoction to represent the bricks made by the Israelite slaves, the soldier used an actual brick.

Despite its physical authenticity, I wondered if this resourceful symbol would have been considered kosher for Passover?

“There have always been variances in the community,” says Rabbi Joel Levenson of Congregation B’nai Jacob in Woodbridge, Conn. “While there are items that make it a seder plate, it’s important to ask, does this [symbol] fulfill the point?”

Lacking ingredients for charoset, a Civil War soldier is said to have used an actual brick.

If the idea of pesticides on your karpas is as appealing as the Ten Plagues, Max Goldberg of the food blog Livingmaxwell.com suggests using ingredients such as grass-fed eggs and organic honey, almond butter and wine to create a seder plate devoid of chemical substances and synthetic growth hormones.

“For many [people], holidays do not mean a holiday from eating healthy food, and Passover can be a difficult time. So what do you do for them?” Goldberg asks. The food items on the seder plate have meaning, but “food is also medicine, regardless of the occasion,” he says.

After becoming a vegetarian 21 years ago, the idea of using an animal bone to represent the pascal sacrifice posed a serious problem for Heidi Krizer Daroff, a mother of two from Potomac, Md. She decided to use a roasted potato in lieu of the roasted shank bone.

“I see the seder plate as representing freedom, and to me, a dead bone was offensive,” she says.

But freedom is not just the absence of shank bones or slavery.

“There is a very modern-day context to the story,” says Rabbi Levi Shemtov, head of the American Friends of Lubavitch office in Washington, D.C.

He says seder participants also must remember those Jews still in bondage and unable to attend a seder. Shemtov leaves an empty seat at his packed Passover dinners as a symbol of solidarity with Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who has been held captive by Hamas since June 2006.

Several years ago, at a college in the Northeast, some students placed crusts of bread on their seder plates as a way to express the exclusion of women and homosexuals from Judaism.

A woman in Maryland uses a roasted potato in lieu of the roasted shank bone.

Playing off that idea but not wanting to violate Passover dietary restrictions, Susannah Heschel decided to place an orange on her seder plate (actually, the first time, she used a tangerine). Everyone at the table got a section to eat, then spit out the seeds in solidarity with LGBT people. “The seeds represented homophobia,” she said.

Heschel, a leading Jewish feminist scholar and the daughter of famous Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, told an Osher Marin JCC audience a few years ago that she was “horrified” at how the orange-on-the-seder-plate story has metamorphosed.

Most people tell the tale these days about Heschel lecturing at a synagogue in Miami when an elderly rabbi stood up and declared, “A woman belongs on the bimah like an orange belongs on the seder plate.”

“What you hear is not what actually happened,” Heschel said in 2002 in San Rafael. “It’s become a bit of an urban legend.”

An orange on the seder plate is commonplace these days, but the story behind it is often wrong.

One, she added, “they took my idea and put it into a man’s mouth.” Two, “they erased the whole idea of the homophobia that needs to be spit out.”

One symbolic item that has no tall tale behind it was the practice of placing an extra piece of matzah on the seder plate. Before Jews were permitted to leave the Soviet Union without difficulty in 1989, this custom became a way to show solidarity with refuseniks, those Soviet Jews whose applications  to emigrate had been refused, says Rabbi Isaac Jeret of Congregation Ner Tamid of South Bay in Rancho Palos Verdes.

“We tell our stories through our ritual items, and the seder plate tells our story as Jews,” Jeret says. “The point is to remind us that we can be liberated. The day the seder plate becomes stagnant is the day Jews are no longer under any threat. But we’re not there yet.”