Happy Easter?

Today is Easter Sunday, for those of raised in that tradition, the day of renewal, ressurection and lots and lots of sugar. I love that this one of the biggest days in those Christian faiths but is TOTALLY based on the pagan calendar. Easter is always the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox. If that ain't pagan, I don't know what is. But we're not going to talk about that now, are we? Traditionally, Easter has been that hallmark of the coming season of renewal, the tulips and crocus should be poking theit first tentative shoots out of the ground. Or, we can get slammed with another six inches of snow. Fine, be that way. I'll pull my parka over my soft, floaty pastel skirt and twinset. I'll forgo the peeptoe pumps for my boots, no Easter bonnets for us, we're still wearing the Floyd R. Turbo hats with the earflaps.
Several years ago, when my nephew was going to a rather steadfast Christain daycare (I think he was about four) and his sister was going to the Catholic school down the street, they both came home just before Easter with the spoils from their respective Easter celebrations. My niece happily showed her jellybeans, chocolate eggs and Peeps while my nephew revealed his treasures. He brought home a number of small plastic eggs and prepared to enjoy his own booty. One can imagine his confusion when his eggs revealed, not jellybeans and chocolate, but items such as a rock, a thorn, a nail, a bit of purple cloth and a penny wrapped in tinfoil. He looked dismayed, to say the very least. Casey had received a set of ressurection eggs as opposed to the expected trove of candy. Look them up and imagine being four and getting this lot. My family, being more than a bit sacreligious from time to time, spent the holiday quoting the scene from "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" when they all look into their bags and announce, "I got a candy bar!", "I got an apple!" and poor Charlie Brown, with his bedsheet full of badly placed eyeholes, announced, "I got a rock." Poor Casey, I think at seventeen, he's since recovered.

We have our own set of traditions, the newest of which involves a couple of dozen Peeps (you know, the bright yellow marshmallow chicks that no one really eats but have become an Easter fixture) and the microwave oven. We have established that two Peeps, nuked at the same time, will actually expand to roughly ten times their normal size and build up enough pressure to move a Pyrex 2-cup measuring cup. The cup is in place to prevent Peep shrapnel from plastering the inside of the microwave with yellow goo upon reaching maximum volume. Maybe a non-traditional commemoration of the holiday, but a whole lot of fun. We did the usual hiding of the eggs thing, plastic and filled with candy, not hard-boiled and dyed. We eschewed the hard boiled because no one in the house likes them and the fact that I fear salmonella. I know what you're thinking, none of us ever died from eating eggs that sat out overnight, but now that I'm an adult...gross. Add my psychopathic cats into the mix and I could easily see some kind of egg massacre going on while we slept. As it was, they seemed to have unearthed a few of the eggs overnight and played kitty hockey with them. The scattered remains of several mini Reeses and stray Hershey miniatures wrappers mixed in the cat yark this morning certainly told the tale. Both of them are currently in a post sugar crash coma on the back of the couch. I mean really, could you resist basking in the sun while on your comedown from a sugar high? By the way, never give a dog jellybeans...the endless chewing will drive you slowly insane, more effective than waterboarding as a form of torture, methinks. So we've adapted the Easter as a time of experimentation and non-traditional observations, I'm sure you all have your own holiday weirdness at your house.

Time to go out and shovel the driveway...happy Spring?