Sunday 12 April 2009

Easter is one of my favourite holidays

Easter's just great. There's loads of chocolate involved, several days off work, lots of relaxing, and no huge loads of presents to buy and wrap. Don't get me wrong, I love Christmas, but Easter is just so more chilled since no-one really expects anything of you. We've had a food-filled day - started off with blueberry pancakes in bed (all three of us!), then lunch at my dad's (delicious cold salmon, complemented perfectly by lime mayonnaise, lush), and dotted throughout with chocolate. Doesn't get much better than that. We even managed to get out to walk the dog and didn't get rained on; given the weather over the last few days that's definitely worthy of comment.

Easter is a strange holiday though, since its meaning seems to be increasingly lost to most of the population (despite Wikipedia claiming that Easter is the "most important annual religious feast in the Christian calendar" - I don't know how much consideration they've given to Christmas, but anyway). Isabel came home from school in the week leading up to the holidays discussing the Easter story, but not in great depth; I guess the concept of crucifixion and resurrection is a tricky one to discuss with a class of four and five year olds. I said she should go in and ask her teacher what all this had to do with bunnies and rabbits (put the cat amongst the pigeons, me?) but I don't think she did. Would have been funny though. Apparently we can thank the Germans in the 16th and 17th centuries for inventing the Easter rabbit, and the symbol of eggs was adopted by early Christians as a a symbol of resurrection.

I think what I really like about Easter (apart from the over-indulgence in chocolate, naturally) is that it's lots of fun without being expensive. Again, me being cheap, but since we're now in a global recession my attitude is increasingly being adopted by others which is nice. Isabel and I had lots of fun this morning making Easter cards for Husbandio and for her Nanne and Grandpa (providers of the salmon lunch - thanks!), and we've also enjoyed several Easter egg hunts this year. Even before Isabel was born we did fun silly things like painting eggs and rolling them down Devil's Dyke on the South Downs - winner is the one whose egg gets furthest without smashing. Or being eaten by the dogs. See - Easter can be a fun holiday for pets too! Secretly, what I really like is that we in the UK and pretty much all of Europe get to enjoy a four day weekend, while the US keeps on toiling. Is that wrong? No, they have the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, so they get their holidays too - but being off work when others are working is always fun. Especially with all that chocolate involved. Speaking of which, do excuse me, I hear an egg calling.....

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