Do you wear hats?
Tradition cements the past to the present and creates memories captured in photos, imaginations, recollections and in minds fading. Some remember the best and some remember the worst of the Thanksgiving dinners ruined by harsh words, or Christmas without an intact family. There can be a warm rush of nostalgia, the sadness of what will never be again, or the mature realization that we are all dysfunctional on some level.
Over eighty-eight per cent of adults re-create their Easter experience with baskets and the giving of candy bunnies, peeps or chocolate eggs. Not only because they want the same in return, yet it isn’t a bad thought.
I was one of the 88% for over 25 years. The jelly beans would mark the trail of the big EB (as he was fondly known in our home) from the sliding glass door looking towards the meadow and split in three directions tracing the path to the baskets for each of the children. Behind a chair, table or plant would be the excesses of the holiday. With the average household spending $131.00 on Easter candy, there was enough for each child’s raging sweet tooth for at least a week or two. Easter is the second biggest candy holiday after Halloween!
As in most childhood delights, the parent gets more from the experience than the child, at least at that moment. I think the payback must be when you see the traditions of your child’s home created in their home with their children. Still waiting for that!
My Mother, a Scotch/Irish, German Catholic in every sense of the word, loved all of the holidays and made a huge fuss about them all. Easter started in February or March with the beloved Easter dress and white patent leather shoe shopping. Do you remember hats? My Mother had some doozies. I remember one navy blue number with tiny pink buds attached. Quite fetching! It does make one wonder about the House of Windsor’s millinery stipend. Never seen the Queen in the same hat, have you? I have never seen the Queen in person so perhaps she wears a hat to dinner with Prince Phillip each night with a TV dinner, which would amortize the expense by two and make it much more palatable to the UK hat police. Enough knightly musings. I had to have a hat as well. Of course with good reason due to the rigorous beliefs of the Catholic Church and head coverings. Boy have things changed in that department. Went for a visit to the local monastery while in France in February and there were no head coverings. Some folks barely covered. Mother is rolling in the grave! I didn’t fight her about the dress and shoes. A lifelong love of shoes was born early. Skipping a generation, my daughter had to be prepped three months in advance of her First Holy Communion as she refused to wear dresses. She is the free spirit hippy today that I toyed with in the late 60’s and early 70’s yet that yearning for Jimmy Choo or Christian Louboutin made me realize early that hippy’s don’t make enough money to support my shoe habit. So I went into the dance studio business. Maybe I should have finished that university education?
Easter has been always the same gift. Inside a beautiful box was a huge chocolate egg. It had “Happy Easter Carol”
written in pink (lots of pink in my life!) icing across the widest part of the egg and inside were individual chocolates three deep. I adored that egg and its contents. I’m not sure when I stopped receiving this beloved gift, yet the tradition in me has me still trying to find that damn egg on the internet today. Tradition.
Then there was the year, along with the cherished egg, Susie chicken arrived. There were times when folks dyed baby chicks and bunnies and gave them as Easter gifts. Susie was wonderful while small. Something happened one morning, a crowing from the kitchen, requiring the renaming of said chicken to Joe Rooster. He was shipped off to an acquaintances farm shortly after and the chicken caper was not reprised in my lifetime or my children’s.
One must not forget the ubiquitous Easter brunch. You must remember this phenomena of carving tables of roast beef, iced oysters, Bloody Marys, and dessert tables laden with choices? I am not sure this over indulgence still exists. We were there right after Mass every Easter with Mother in tow and three children in varying degrees of disgust, unmatched outfits and rolling eyeballs. They ate though, boy did they eat! It was a tradition not to be missed.
Life has simplified itself with time and the fact we now live on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with no grandchildren nearby. The grannies here we know take their kids to the beach on Easter to surf. I will be content to sip a terrific Galante Malbec in my Jimmy Choo’s. Hoppy Easter!