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Easter Memories
Mar. 23rd, 2008 | 11:12 am
I’ve always thought of Easter as one of the more watery, pastel colored holidays. It’s not that I didn’t have fun. It just couldn’t compare with the slightly sinister red and gold richness of the winter holiday season, and there were a lot of “buts,” “stills,” and “howevers,” attached to Easter that were absent when it came to that incomparable Christian trinity, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Easter egg hunts were entertaining, but I usually ended up lumbered with a slightly higher quotient of hard-boiled eggs to malted milk eggs/jelly-beans than I liked. Sometimes all of us would dress up and make one of our rare appearances at church, a sop to our Episcopalian grandmother, but afterwards there would be a party at her house with a baked ham and milk punch and lots of cheerful grownups, so that was some compensation.
It had something to do with the illustration in one of the books at Sunday school showing Jesus trickling in a vapor out of a cave around a boulder, his arms over his head like a cartoon ghost going “boo!” When we talked about this, we children were savvy enough to look serious because, we had been given to understand, that was the TRUE meaning of Easter, but we were really just humoring the grown-ups. Back then it was all about rabbits for me, specifically chocolate rabbits.
Biting the head off the bunny was one of the high points of the day. We had a very brainy cousin who, on one of our Easter visits to his family, confessed to being a chocolate bunny hoarder and proudly showed us his collection, still wrapped in their foil and plastic, from one Easter, two, three, and four Easters ago. Given that he was two years younger than me this was impressive, but I still felt he'd failed to grasp an important point.
And for some reason, it was also about hats. Part of our get-up, when my sister and I were dressed up for Easter, had to include a hat, which was a little baffling, but just enough of a novelty to be entertaining. Then we children would be lined up for pictures. The most famous of these, the one that’s still put on mantels, passed around and chuckled over by the older generation shows my sister and me in our pastel dresses and Easter bonnets, my face a mask of anguish because our little brother had just leaned forward and bitten me.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lamoro/205
It’s a mysterious picture. He was not known for being a hellion. On the contrary he was and remains one of my quieter, more self-contained siblings. I can’t remember what I did to provoke him, but it must have been pretty bad, perhaps involving the theft of a bunny. Or at least its head.
It had something to do with the illustration in one of the books at Sunday school showing Jesus trickling in a vapor out of a cave around a boulder, his arms over his head like a cartoon ghost going “boo!” When we talked about this, we children were savvy enough to look serious because, we had been given to understand, that was the TRUE meaning of Easter, but we were really just humoring the grown-ups. Back then it was all about rabbits for me, specifically chocolate rabbits.
Biting the head off the bunny was one of the high points of the day. We had a very brainy cousin who, on one of our Easter visits to his family, confessed to being a chocolate bunny hoarder and proudly showed us his collection, still wrapped in their foil and plastic, from one Easter, two, three, and four Easters ago. Given that he was two years younger than me this was impressive, but I still felt he'd failed to grasp an important point.
And for some reason, it was also about hats. Part of our get-up, when my sister and I were dressed up for Easter, had to include a hat, which was a little baffling, but just enough of a novelty to be entertaining. Then we children would be lined up for pictures. The most famous of these, the one that’s still put on mantels, passed around and chuckled over by the older generation shows my sister and me in our pastel dresses and Easter bonnets, my face a mask of anguish because our little brother had just leaned forward and bitten me.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lamoro/205
It’s a mysterious picture. He was not known for being a hellion. On the contrary he was and remains one of my quieter, more self-contained siblings. I can’t remember what I did to provoke him, but it must have been pretty bad, perhaps involving the theft of a bunny. Or at least its head.