Easter Memories

[valarltd]

First, a blessed Easter to my friends who are celebrating.

Second, there will be no snarking on the holiday here today. Any commenter who snarks get the comment hidden. You are warned. After all, I have a dying and reviving god as well. Several, actually.

Instead, I'm talking about memories.

I remember watching this one Saturday evening in my early teens as my sister jlm121 and I dyed eggs.

I tended to split Easter between my parents, one year at mom's, one at Dad's, It seemed like I was home more often when I was little, because I was usually in the children's choir and at least one year we did a cantata.

I was 11 that year (so 79), and kept cracking up at the bit of dialogue "Someone's coming." "Is it the gardener?" because I kept picturing Sam Gamgee (from the Rankin Bass cartoon) clipping the hedges around the Tomb of Arimathea, and eavesdropping on the women who came to check. (There ain't no eaves in Jerusalem and that's a fact!)

We always had new Easter dresses and shoes. The first white shoes of the summer. One year, my mother crocheted my Easter dress. It was lavender. I must have been about five, because the pictures show me still blond.

My grandmothers both had Easter bunny centerpieces. Grandma Wymer had a bunch of L'eggs eggs she had painted (grandma was a painter like I am a writer) and added stickers to around this two foot tall bunny.

One year, Grandma Wymer made hot cross buns. My grandmother was only a passable cook, and to make matters worse, she was highly distractable. These things were dry and tasteless and horrid. I wanted them to be good, so I ate two, although Aunt Shirley's monkey bread was much better.

Ham was de riguer for Easter dinner, no matter which grandmother had cooked it.

There was always an egg hunt at my stepfather's work. Every year I found two of those nasty candy-coated marshmallow eggs. And that was usually it.

We went to all three services at the Methodist Church. We'd go to the Maundy Thursday communion service. After I was confirmed in 77, this was a much bigger deal for me, because I didn't just have the nice little snack, I sat and examined my conscience the whole time it was being passed around.

Good Friday was always a Tenebrae service. We started out lit. Then the electric lights dimmed and only the candles were left. Then one by one they went out.

Then there was a Sun Rise Service on Sunday. We made that once or twice. I remember sitting on metal chairs in the cold April pre-dawn waiting for sunrise. I remember a pancake breakfast with hot chocolate afterward too.

One year, we did a passion play. I was somewhere around 8. I remember very little of it, except shouting in the crowd and waving palm branches. And Brad Igoe as Barabbas, in a (very modest) loincloth, dirt and manacles. I don't even remember which of the teenage boys played Jesus.

There you have it. An Easter basket of memories. Pick and choose and feel free to spit any items you don't like out.

Comments

[jlm121.livejournal.com]

Dad and I went to Red Bridge today and I found myself also thinking of Easters past, of little girls in hats and white shoes, of dying eggs and hunting for them in the backyard of the house on Sunnyslope.

I remember the taste of coconut and of lots of ham. I remember the communion service at Red Bridge of little glasses of grape juice and white bread shredded into almost crumbs.

Blessed Be, my sister.