Happy Easter Weekend!

Welcome to Easter weekend!

My imitation of this scene from Tim Burton's
The Nightmare Before Christmas earned me
the nickname, "The Bunn", from one of my exes.

I was raised in a good Christian (Lutheran) household.  As a youngster, I was brought up with the traditional stories of Christ dying for our sins on Good Friday and rising again on Easter Sunday.  We celebrated Holy Week and ate fish on Fridays throughout Lent.  I can't recall ever actually giving anything up for Lent, but I think I may have tried a couple of times.

We went to church every Sunday (year-round), but especially during Holy Week.  Palm Sunday brought a collection of palm leaves folded into crosses.  Ash Wednesday found us displaying the ashes of the burned palms on our foreheads throughout the day.  Maundy Thursday and Good Friday found us in church again (I was getting tired of church services at this point).  There was a break on Saturday while we awaited the joyous return of Christ on Sunday.  I also can't forget to include Fasnacht Day - Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras for those outside of the Pennsylvania Dutch area - with the tradition of using the last of the lard to make fasnachts, or doughnuts.

I know my Evangelical calendar is off a bit, but mixed up as it is, it brings back many good memories.

My favorite part of the season was the music and celebrations of Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday.  Our organist was one of the best I've ever known.  The pipe organ we had was a powerful instrument with many stops which belted out the Glory of God to the Heavens.  It was a true celebration when the zymbelstern (a rotating star with bells attached) was engaged and the tinkling bells rang out above the pipes.

As I got into high school, I drew away from the church.  I did go to a Catholic high school, but being one of only a few Protestant students, I was not required to participate in the Catholic traditions.  At one point, curiosity won out and I wandered around the chapel looking at the stations while fellow students followed the Stations of the Cross, but that was he extent of my high school religious career.

Work slowly became more important.  I slowly became a "Holiday Christian".  When our organist passed on, my hometown church was no longer the same and I stopped attending altogether.  I have since sampled several different churches and beliefs and have since formed my own.

I will, however, always hold my childhood memories of the Easter season close.

Several experiences stand out.

My parents stood strong in childhood beliefs, but especially with Santa and the Easter Bunny.

Every Christmas, we would put out eggnog and cookies for Santa and carrots for the reindeer.  For many years, I couldn't wait to see if  Santa took a bite or if the carrots were gone.  The cookies were always mostly eaten, the eggnog mostly gone and a couple carrot tops would remain on the back porch.

One very special Christmas, I woke to an icy snow cover.  My mother told me that if we were lucky, we might see where Santa and his sleigh landed - our roof was much too steep for him to park and come down the chimney.  Also, we lived in the country, so leaving the back door open for him didn't draw any fear of burglars sneaking in during the night.

Sure enough, when I checked the porch for discarded carrot tops, I found large boot prints leading to and from the back porch.  These led to the back driveway.  There, preserved in the icy crust of the snow, were hoof and sleigh tracks.

I may never remember the gifts I received that year, but the happy memory of those tracks will remain with me for life.

Speaking of tracks, we'll jump to one special springtime memory.

One Easter weekend, a very good friend of my mother came to visit.  She told us that she knew a trick to find out if the Easter Bunny really came to visit.  All we had to do was spread flour across the doorway and the Bunny would track it through the house.  So we tried it.

Sure enough, I came down the next morning to find Bunny tracks from the back door, up the hallway into the dining room.  We always set up our Easter baskets on the dining room table.  I could follow the trail of footprints up a chair, onto the table and around each basket.  The tracks finally hopped off the table, back through the kitchen and out the back door again.

I can't believe they make a pattern for these now!
Back in my day, we used our middle three fingers
for the toes and our thumbs for the back pad.
From tidbitsandtwine.com

While my rational adult mind knows the truth, I will always treasure the evidence I had of Santa and the Easter Bunny.  I believe my parents still have pictures lingering around the house.  That is my proof of a very special childhood.

I'll finish with a tradition that may not be known quite as well.  The tossing of the Maundy Thursday egg.

Easter egg tosses may be better known.  You take an egg and toss it to the ground in front of you.  If it lands on the ground unbroken, you will have good luck.  This comes from a Germanic tradition of throwing a Maundy Thursday egg - it must be laid that day - over your house.  As the tradition goes, the unbroken egg (yes it is raw and NOT hard-boiled) gets buried where it lands.  This special egg will grant good luck to the household for the next year.

My family would follow this tradition for years throughout my childhood.  My brother had a much better pitching arm than I and would always be the one to throw the egg over the house.  He had it down to a science, avoiding trees and clotheslines and the gravel of the back driveway.

The tradition grew every year as friends and neighbors heard of the bizarre practice and asked us to throw over their own houses.  It gradually became an all day affair and even made the newspaper a couple of times.  When I did a Google search for "maundy thursday egg toss", the first two sites that came up were two articles one of our neighbors wrote for the local paper, one for 1983 and one for 1988.

Whether the egg gave good luck or not, I'll never really know, but enough people believed in to keep it going for as long as we could provide the service.

I'll never forget any of these treasured memories.

As an adult, I don't celebrate Easter as I used to.  Occasionally, we'll decorate.  Usually we'll trade cards and chocolate.  One time, probably 15 years ago at this point, I even dressed as the Easter Bunny for the kids at the Capital City mall in Camp Hill, PA.  It was a hot suit - like wrapping myself in a rug - and I remember hanging a bag of ice from the inside top of the head as a form of "air conditioning".  I stank after just a few hours.  It was all worth it though.  No one knew who I was other than my handler and a handful of people at my real job.  I was just another guy in a rabbit costume in another mall, but I was able to provide Easter memories for maybe a hundred children and their families that year, complete with a photo.

My costume was very similar to this one.

This year I celebrate with you.  I give you my memories as a reminder to create your own and start making them with your children and loved ones so they have something to hold onto in the future.

Whether you are celebrating the death and rebirth of Christ or your beliefs go further back to the celebration of new life and the coming of the green season after the death brought on by winter, Happy Easter to you all!