"Easter"

Easter Sunday, and I just keep putting quotes around "Easter", vaguely aware that this, at best, will sadden my father and, at worst, cause him heartbreak. Why the quotes? Because to me, this is not a day on which someone rose from the dead, although I was raised faithfully on that story. This is a day where all the stores are inexplicably closed and most people in this part of the world are going to church, wearing hats, and having their picture taken with a man dressed like a rabbit. I haven't given this much thought in recent years, I've just gone along with whatever celebration I was lucky enough to be invited to, and I've delighted in whatever simple joys my children took from it all: the new dresses, the candy, the special meals and extra dessert.

But now Clio is three, and she's pretty smart, and we're living on our own in a town where no one is going to invite us to their celebration, and I've learned a few things about the perpetuation of myths. First, I find myself flummoxed by these holidays that are both religious and commercial: while the two pieces seem only vaguely connected (as my friend Justin, who was not raised christian, asked this morning, what does a giant bunny have to do with the rebirth of Christ, anyway?), I still worry about communicating these holidays absent a story. I mean, I'm a writer, I need a story to tell, and what, exactly, is the story of Easter if you're not talking about Jesus? Even if you are content to just go with the pagan rituals associated with these holidays, there is still a challenge for a parent. At Christmas, Dave and I discovered that parents are, in fact, responsible to not only play Santa (or the Easter Bunny), but to create the myth of Santa (etc.) in the first place. This winter, it didn't occur to us to mention Santa Claus. In fact, I remember a moment where someone asked us if Clio was expecting a visit from Santa and we looked at each other, then looked at Clio, and just went ahead and asked her: Clio, do you know who Santa is? She nodded, tentatively, as if she had heard the name but didn't know the details, and this was probably precisely the case. I think we had assumed that Santa would simply be in the air around Christmas time, and when asked, we would fill in the blanks. But we didn't. You might think that, again absent the Christ child and the star of Bethlehem, I would cling to this story: the north pole, the reindeer, the squeezing down chimneys, but as a grownup it seems a preposterous thing to build up and create for your child.

Do you see why I refered to my Christmas as a bah-humbug experience? In a way, I think I realized the impact of being left out of the myth when Clio asked, crestfallen, on Christmas Eve why Santa did not bring presents to her or to Eleri. My sister in law Maud, bless her, quickly explained to Clio that since we were not home in Boulder for Christmas, Santa did not know where to find her. Santa is just enough in the air to create disappointment at his refusal to show up and do his duty.

Next year, will we encourage a letter to Santa? Cookies and milk on Christmas eve? I'm not sure. so much of this ritual seems to be a reflection of your own childhood, and I don't remember ever writing lists or leaving out treats or visiting a stranger at the mall in a red suit. But I do want to find a way to bring some magic to the holiday for my kids, to make it not just about getting stuff (though I would be un-American if I tried to pretend I don't enjoy the thrill my kids get from getting a new toy.) What I do remember is making dozens of Christmas cookies with my mom, making ornaments and decorating the tree, singing carols and staying up way past my bedtime with my cousins at my Nonny's house, and I suppose that is why I encourage--and will continue to encourage--all those behaviors for my kids.

So, what about "easter"? Here's what I remember: my mom made me dresses from patterns and fabric that I got to choose, and let me wear them to church with a wide-brimmed hat and little white gloves, even though it was usually too cold for spring dresses in Minnesota in April; easter-egg hunts at an aunt or uncles, with all of my cousins; ham, and rolls, and cookies and candy. And getting silly from the sugar, with all those cousins.

My mom continues to take care of the dresses, though now they come from TJ Maxx.

There was a ham, and lemon-scented olive oil muffins and fried polenta, and strawberry pie and candy. Absent the cousins, we invited Dakota.

Last night, Dave and I talked it over and decided that there would be an Easter Bunny this year. At Target, I discovered along with a handful of other last-minuters, about 17 aisles completely divested of their easter candy- no peeps, no cadbury cream eggs, very few seasonal goodies to go round. But that's okay. We're not big on candy around here, and we figured that our bunny would bring something better. And I think he did: card games and seeds to plant and cute little socks (and, okay, a few candy treats), all packed in to some very usable colored plastic buckets. Easter buckets!

We took a note from Christmas, too, and we were sure to let the Bunny know that Dakota would be celebrating "easter" at our house this year, so the Bunny would knowto include him the egg hunt, and where to leave his bucket.

You know what? Clio loved the idea that the Easter Bunny would come to our house while she was sleeping and leave her treats, and that he knows her so well that he chose lavender Beauty and the Beast socks for her, and that she got to eat a lollipop and some chocolate covered pretzels, and not even during a normally sanctioned time for "dessert." She loved dyeing eggs--first last week with her grandparents, and then today with Dakota--even if it was just another craft project to her.



(Eleri just loved those muffins, the pie, and the candy.)


We'll see how long this lasts, though. Clio already caught me putting the eggs out for the egg hunt, and later doing damage control when the squirrels in our yard got a bunch of them open and ate through some others. (For the record, squirrels do like whoppers shaped and colored like easter eggs; they do not like life saver gummy bunnies.) She seemed to buy this whole idea that Mommy is the Bunny's helper, but she will outsmart me before long.

Unless she is of the smartest breed of children of all, like my cousin Katie, who pretended to hold on to a belief in Santa for years and years, threatening emotional meltdown if Santa failed to appear, all the better to milk some extra gifts out of her parents.

For now, all of this should work for the kids, and I think I'm okay with it. But I continue to struggle with making meaning at christian holidays when I don't consider myself a person with religion. My parents raised me with religion, but they also taught me to be my own person and to question, two impulses I highly value, especially as I begin to understand that those are not always the easiest things to breed in your children, because they involve letting go. In a way, and as strange as it sounds, I hope my dad can find it in him to be proud that I find the need to put "easter" in quotations, that I question the story of Jesus. If it hadn't been for his strong faith, the religious holiday would be much easier to dismiss.