Easter Week

Well, you may be expecting some religious diatribe, but, no, not the case.  Easter for me is a nice weekend.  Period. I read the Bible - the Gospels.  I think about the meaning of Easter.  For me, it is a very, very  religious time.  But, for me, it is not a holiday time.

Years and years ago when we had toddlers, I was shocked and upset when some distant family houseguests, who opted out of Easter Sunday church services, appeared on our porch after Easter Services, with big ol' Easter baskets, which, they told our toddlers, were from the Easter Bunny.

Growing up, I had never heard of the Easter Bunny.

And I let the "Easter Bunny" thing go, yea, whatever...

Well!  Fast-forward to the following year, and Easter weekend came and went, a religious service, and all was very good.  So I thought...

Daughter #1 came home from nursery school the next day, bereft.  Absolutely sad and morose:  the Easter Bunny had come to her classmates' homes, but not hers.  She asked, "Why didn't the Easter Bunny come to our house?"  Omigoodness!!!!!  I felt like a such a pitiful mother.  What???  The Easter Bunny?  Nobody told me about this.  My family did not celebarate the Easter Bunny.  What was the Easter Bunny?!  How was I to know?!  I felt like I was from another world.  I called a neighborhood mom and comismerated re: the Easter Bunny.  I felt like such a loser Mom, because my kid was so sad, and I had no idea what the Easter Bunny did.  (I went to Wal Mart that evening, 2 days after Easter, and scrapped up odds & ends of Easter egg paraphernalia and wowed Daughter #1 a day later.  We told her there were too many kids to deliver in one day.) 

Still...I was upset.  Easter to me is a deeply religious, and only religious weekend.  That's just how I was brought up.  

And so you ask, what about Christmas, the birth of Christ?  And Santa Claus?  I don't have all the answers, except that St. Nick was a good guy who did good things in real life, and therefore we celebrate his good works.  The Easter Bunny...well, I don't know - I haven't read the documentaion about him.  I still am unfamiliar with him.  I do love from childhood the song Peter Cottontail, sung by Gene Autry.  I never, EVER put this song into my religious Easter weekend.  Peter Cottontail, for me, was all about spring.

Ok.  Here is my Easter weekend blog.  Easter for me is all religious, and not eggs and bunnies and pastels and whatnot.  I can celebrate those things, and I do, our family duck egg hunts and whatnot, but!  That is not Easter.

Easter is the celebration that Christ is risen, and we are followers of Christ.  Indeed.