Artfully placed chocolate bunny among our new carrot seedlings.
What Easter traditions do you observe? In my family, every year my mother attempts to explain to my older brother and me — both ostensibly adults — that Easter Monday is not a real thing, at least in terms of the Christian calendar.
‘How many days was Jesus dead for then?’ one of us will demand.
‘Three,’ she patiently explains. ‘He died on Good Friday.’
‘Not a good Friday for him,’ someone invariably pipes up.
She continues. ‘So he was in the tomb for Friday and Saturday and on Easter Sunday he rose again.’
‘That’s not three days,’ we protest. ‘We were always told he was dead for three days.’ We are basing this on a few visits to Sunday school with our grandmother when we were three and five. (We stopped going when we realised that our granddad saying ‘If they’re handing out ice-cream, bring some home for me’ as we headed off was a joke. There was never ice-cream.) ‘Are you sure he didn’t rise again on Easter Monday?’
‘Easter Monday isn’t part of Easter,’ she asserts through gritted teeth. ‘That’s just a public holiday.”
‘Of course it’s part of Easter,’ we scoff. ‘It’s got double demerits for traffic offences, so it must be part of Easter.’
‘He rose on the Sunday. Not the Monday.’ She is adamant.
‘Then it wasn’t three days. Or it was a kind of Contiki-package-holiday three days. You know, three days but only two nights.’
‘Yes,’ Mum agrees. ‘It was like that.’
‘So he came out of the cave on Sunday morning. In time for the Easter Egg hunt, was it?’
Usually it is at this point that Mum asks us to go outside and play. Which is not possible because it is always raining at Easter. It is the perfect time to hole up in a cave with some chocolate eggs or bunnies.
Have a wonderful and safe Easter.