To all the folks celebrating Easter this weekend, have a wonderful holiday! Now, for the rest of you, I have a few recommendations:
- Dye a couple of dozen eggs. Every time you open your refrigerator, you’ll smile. The world needs fewer white eggs.
- 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.
- 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.)