To all the folks celebrating Easter this weekend, have a wonderful holiday! Now, for the rest of you, I have a few recommendations:

1. Dye a couple of dozen eggs. Every time you open your refrigerator, you’ll smile. The world needs fewer white eggs.
2. Go out on Monday and buy a bunch of half-price candy. Make up a basket and surprise your loved ones for Chickie-Bunny Day. If you don’t know what C-B Day is, keep reading.
3. If you happen to be in New Zealand over the weekend, there is an alternative activity you might enjoy:

From NZ City News, Christchurch, New Zealand, 5 April 2006

The Catholic Bishop of Canterbury hopes people will celebrate Easter the traditional way, and not attend a semi-nude jelly wrestling event.

On Easter Sunday a pub in Banks Peninsula is holding a jelly wrestling event that involves two women fighting in bikinis.

Publican Donna Blackburn admits it is possible items of clothing could fall off.

Catholic Bishop of Canterbury John Cunneen says everyone has a right to spend the day how they want, but hopes many people will remember the death and resurrection of Jesus by attending Church services.

Bishop Cunneen says semi-nude jelly wrestling is an odd way to commemorate Easter.

When I was a kid, I listened to guys like Bishop Cunneen, and we celebrated Easter the normal way. I never questioned what it was all about. It seemed like a great story, a guy who got killed and came back to life a couple of days later.

To me, the Passion play is wonderful theater, and I love hearing different people read the different parts. The problem is, as an adult, I don’t believe the story. It requires faith, which I lack. When Easter comes around, it’s just another day.

I do, however, love many aspects of the holiday. I love coloring hard-boiled eggs, turning them into art and destroying them by eating them. Like art installations, they are temporary, fleeting, just-for-the-moment. Of course, nowadays, we take a zillion digital photos of them. That’s cheating.

I’ve never rolled an Easter egg. I have, however, hidden a few. Some too well.

Years ago, my family was sitting around the sunroom on Christmas, and somebody made a hilarious comment. Dad laughed so hard, he threw his hands in the air and hit the hanging light over his head. As the light fixture tipped, an item came tumbling out of the top — and reflexively, he caught it. He held it up, and we all gasped: An Easter egg. It had been hidden there 8 months earlier and rotting ever since. Thank goodness it didn’t break when he caught it!

Honestly, the thing I loved about Easter was the same thing I loved about Halloween. A huge quantity of candy, all to myself, not to be shared with any of my five greedy siblings. Easter was even better than Halloween, because I am crazy for jelly beans, as opposed to candy corn (bleh).

Twenty years ago, I decided Easter wasn’t much of a holiday without church and Easter bonnets. So I invented my own holiday. Chickie-Bunny Day falls on the first Saturday after the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox. In other words, the Saturday after Easter, when all the candy has gone on sale. It’s an excuse to make a basket of half-price candy and eat sugar until your face breaks out.

Since I invented Chickie-Bunny Day myself, I decree that semi-nude jelly wrestling is a fine way to celebrate it.

Pass the marmalade, will ya?

(For a few more chuckles, see my limerick about jelly wrestling.)

“Psssst, Julie, you awake?”
It’s 8 AM, and an indistinct mumbling comes from under the guest bed pillow.
“You’re sleeping in the garage, and I need to get the car out!”

Normally, I wouldn’t make a guest sleep in the garage. But in this case, my sister had come for the week, and she was sleeping in the guest room where all the bicycles are stored.

Our current house-sitting gig is in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, and we’re walking distance from restaurants, grocery stores, and the library. We parked the Squid Wagon, our 3/4 ton Ford van, when we arrived weeks ago, and we walk or ride bikes everywhere.

Luckily for us, only two blocks away from us is the bicyclist’s version of the interstate: The Burke-Gilman trail.

The Burke-Gilman is about 18 miles long, and it runs along the Ship Canal from Ballard to the University District, then it loosely follows the shore of Lake Washington to Bothell. From there, you can connect to another 10-mile trail, so an out-and-back bike ride is well over 50 miles.

Admittedly, the trail can get overused, especially on the weekends. But it’s still more relaxing than dealing with traffic, potholes, and stoplights.

The trail is named after two men, Thomas Burke and Daniel Gilman, who were responsible for the Seattle, Lake Shore, and Eastern Railway. They were forward thinkers with big dreams for their railway, considering that in 1885, there were only a few families living along the route. It ended up being a heavily used spur route, but by 1971, it was abandoned.

The unused tracks, though, were just right for a bicycle route. Some forward-thinking Seattle and King county voters approved the bond issues to pay for the various portions of the trail, so that by 1978, you could ride from Gasworks Park to Kenmore.

The day after waking Julie to get the “car” out, Barry and I borrowed a friend’s bicycle so she could ride the Burke-Gilman with us. We moseyed along, dodging college students with iPods and backpacks in the University District. There were many people walking and bikes, bikes, bikes.

On the way out, I looked at the scenery. Everything was a riot of spring, and some portions of the trail felt like peaceful green tunnels. Plum and cherry trees had exploded in pink and white blossoms, and daffodils and hyacinths provided yellow and purple accents. We rested halfway in a park under blue skies with fluffy clouds, watching a floatplane lazily follow the surface of Lake Washington.

On the way back, I paid more attention to my fellow trail-users. There were a few roller blades and lots of strollers, some accompanied by young parents and some by grandpas. I was surprised that there were no children on bicycles, only adults. But such variety of bicycles! It ranged from recumbents to old-fashioned bikes with baskets and wide handlebars. There were some slow cyclists, like us, but more fast riders. The really, really fast riders were dressed as “space aliens” and had strange bulges in their clothing that I suspected might have been bananas, also known as bicycle fuel.

I’m sure Burke and Gilman would be amazed to see their railroad line converted to a bicycle highway. They probably wouldn’t even recognize the things we call bicycles, given what bicycles looked like back in 1885. Cyclists didn’t dare ride fast, because they hadn’t yet invented brakes!

Thank goodness Burke and Gilman put in their railroad, so we can have our “bike freeway.” It’s thanks to forward-thinkers like them that we have an extensive rail network across the U.S. — the same network that brings bananas to bicyclists.