The other day at the store, we passed some simple baskets—no bunnies, no eggs, no grass or decorations. Clementine reached for them and said “Da bunny! Da bunny!”
“The bunny?” I asked.
“Yes, da bunny,” she said, nodding. “Hop, hop, hop. Bye bye.”
This is how lots of our conversation go these days, so while you may be scratching your head in bewilderment, I totally got what was going on. But how did she learn about the Easter Bunny who hop, hop, hops with a basket and then goes away? Of course: day care.
The next day I asked Julie if they had been talking about the Easter Bunny lately, and the whole mess of the kids fell in line as if on cue and started singing parts of “Peter Cottontail,” all in different keys and at different points in the verses. They put their little hands out in front of them, curved over as if in simulation of paws, and began to hop all over the place shouting, then screaming, “Hop! Hop! Hop!” until the song faded away, the hoping became a pogo-like jumping, and the place descended into madness.
Well, hell. I guess we’re celebrating Easter this year.
But here’s the thing: I don’t really remember much about the myth of Easter. Yeah, it involves baskets and dying eggs and plastic eggs and candy and looking for eggs and (in my house) making Easter hats out of Peeps and an upside-down basket, but the actual beginning-to-end story evades me. We dye the eggs in advance, but how does the Easter Bunny find them and why does he hide them? How do the plastic eggs filled with pennies and jelly beans come into play? If the Easter Bunny fills your basket with chocolate and goodies (or, as the Peter Cottontail song would suggest, “Easter joys”), what do you carry around with you to find all the plastic and hard-boiled eggs? And why, oh why, do people make egg salad out of the hard-boiled eggs that are stained with who know what kind of food dye and have been unrefrigerated for who knows how long? I have philosophical questions, too, about what the Easter Bunny brings (do we really need another mysterious character bringing us heaps of gifts?), why he or she wants to do this and how we explain the bunny getting around, picking up baskets, hiding eggs, etc. This is much better fleshed out in the Santa story.
Nevertheless, I’m a sucker for my kid and am happy to jump on the bandwagon of any holiday if I can revamp it just a bit for our purposes. For instance, all the Easter candy is really just for me and Nate. We’ll give her dried fruit and yogurt-covered raisins, right? And books, books will be a big part. And we’ll take a trip to the zoo that day to look at bunnies. See, we have ideas. But there is a basic formula, so in search of the essentials (plastic eggs, day-glo grass) we headed to Target the other day and were totally amazed by the throng of people wandering dazed or angrily through the aisles, stuffing their carts with all kinds of stuff they hadn’t really come in for but felt obligated to supply their children (here I blame the underdeveloped story of the E.B.; parents are shooting in the dark here!). It was amazing. And angry…did I mention how angry everyone was in the face of all that sugar?
So here’s what I wanna know. What are your Easter traditions? Anything you can pass along?
9 comments:
It's been a long time and I've since converted to Judaism, but I do sort of recall Easter at our house when I was a kid.
First of all, there's the pretty Easter dress, which usually includes a bunch of ridiculous stuff like a straw hat, little gloves, a tiny purse ... all purchased to look like a pretty Southern princess goon during Easter Sunday church services. You could *totally* have fun in a dress-up way with this. I used to *love* getting a new dress and all the accoutrements.
The Easter egg hunts are usually held several days before Easter, sometimes even the weekend before, and are usually sponsored by local organizations like the Lions Club. They're divided by age group and the eggs are typically plastic ones filled with little prizes, candy or raffle tickets.
Several days before Easter, we always dyed eggs and colored on them with wax crayons and stuff and then just set them around as decoration.
On Easter Sunday morning, you get your Easter basket from your parents after you wake up. This usually had a couple dyed Easter eggs in it. (I don't recall ever getting sick from them, but they'd only been around a day or two before Easter.) Breakfast wasn't usually any big deal at our house, and we weren't allowed to eat any of our candy until after church. After breakfast you get to put on all your awesome Easter outfit get-ups and then you go to church. If you're not churchy or just don't want to fight the throngs of Easter traffic, you could probably make up a new family tradition, like getting dressed up for a big family brunch, not getting super dressed up and going on a family walk to a park, &c. After church (or whatever), you get to come home, take off all your prized Easter clothes and put on regular stuff, and gorge yourself on your Easter basket. (Dried fruit, chocolate and trail mix were always my favorites, but my brother loved the Cadbury eggs.)
Later that evening, you sit down to a big ham dinner. I'm not sure where this comes from, and doesn't it seem kind of weird? Since historical Jesus was a Jew?
I'm not familiar with any back story to the Easter bunny, but I didn't have a lot of intellectual curiosity as a kid and just took it at face value: A rabbit delivers all the eggs. OK. When do we eat?
I hope that helps. Also, by way of introduction, I'm Erica. I don't have kids, but found your blog when some awesome friends of mine were pregnant with their son, Ronan. Now I'm hooked. :) OK, bye!
We have a Hinjew household (1/2 Hindu, 1/2 Jewish)...so no help here. However, my mother (a crafty arteest) started making hand painted eggs (she blows out the egg, paints patterns with wax, dyes, waxes, dyes...the whole shebang) a while back and has gotten *very* good lately. In keeping with our randomness, this year she got bored in Feburary and decorated eggs early and gave them away as Valentine's Day presents (justifing this by saying now people would have their hand blown and painted eggs early, to appreciate when Easter finally came). Now that Easter is here, she's sick of it and doesn't want to make anymore. It is frightening how random we are sometimes...
= )
We totally had an awesome Easter tradition. My dad always drew this great face, and he would draw a face like that on a bunny and we called it E. Bunny. E. Bunny would make up wacky clues that would send us on a hunt not for eggs but for our Easter baskets, which E. Bunny would have hidden somewhere in the house. We'd have to do the wacky clue thing for awhile, sometimes going out into the yard for a clue, sometimes finding one in the washing machine, &c. &c. Finally we'd find the baskets. They were smaller than Halloween pumpkins, and they probably didn't have much candy in them, all told--usually a chocolate bunny, candy-coated chocolate eggs, jelly beans (I love black jelly beans, so I usually got a whole bag of those)--and it was all in the Easter grass, and there would usually also be some kind of small present, like a CD. We decorated eggs, too, but I hate eggs, so I never had to eat them. One thing you could do, if you don't like the idea of eating them, is to blow their raw contents out and decorate the hollowed shells. Then you can keep them forever, too.
We also went to church, and I think we also ate pancakes, because we usually do that on holidays. But what I remember is that E. Bunny was totally hip and that we thought of his ways as completely confined to our family.
This is all such great advice! Erica: good call on the crazy get-up (oh, and will you help me with the Judaism part of C's religious education when the time comes? Indie Mama: ditto on the Hinjew aspect. Dr. S: I LOVE the stories of your childhood. Is it too late for your parents to adopt me?
no particular traditions besides lying around watching cartoons involving rabbits and eating a shitload of chocolate. although...
my mama would make pinholes in eggs and blow the yolk and egg whites out, and then paint the hollow shells in really intricate patterns and hang them from an old tree branch in a very odd sort of homage to the christmas tree.
my dad would make a stencil of the easter bunny's foot, and then shake flour over it to make a footprint trail. he followed this up with wild stories about how he and the easter bunny were mates or drinking buddies of some sort and would give fairly ludicrous descriptions of what the easter bunny looked like, much to my 5 year old amazement.
...actually, when i confronted him about it again at age 14, he still claimed he and the E.B were friends. he looked somewhat horrified that i didn't believe him.
Everyone wants to be adopted by my parents, because they rocked out the whole time we were kids. And in fact they still rock out! When I was in grad school, one year I got a phone call on Easter morning, and it was my dad, calling from the St. Louis airport, to give me E. Bunny's clues for the year. There was no basket or anything; he was just calling with the clues while he waited for a flight.
My parents are truly awesome.
I'd be happy to share the Judaism. My fiance makes some pretty amazing vegan matzoh balls these days .... :)
OH! Dr. S reminded me of the Easter basket grass! And the chocolate bunny ... how could I forget the chocolate bunny? We'd break ours into pieces and dip them in peanut butter. Mmmm.
Wait, do they even have bunnies at the zoo? If they don't, is there any way I could convince you to convince Clementine that the capybara is a rabbit?
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