This has been an Easter unlike any other…
For 4 weeks now, we’ve been in quarantine. Four weeks of scheduling grocery shopping. Four weeks my children haven’t seen their friends, cousins or classmates in the flesh. Four weeks I’ve been a mother, nurse, writer, wife … and now middle school and high school teacher, resource finder, creative outlet user, frontline emergency worker. I’m tired.
And now for the sake of my children and for the sake of searching for goodness (a principle I always promote), we are faced with a holiday, that in my humble opinion, must be celebrated. Not because I feel a religious obligation, because I don’t (and I mean that with no disrespect to those who do). It must be celebrated because our children, our selves, have been robbed of enough these past few weeks.
We’ve been robbed of peace-of-mind, robbed of face-to-face human interaction, robbed of convenience, day-to-day food items and amenities we’ve come to expect, robbed of traditional schooling and many jobs, and some of us have even been robbed of our safety and health. I will not allow this virus to rob us of this holiday too. And yet we have this moral and social obligation to maintain social distancing for the sake of that very health and safety we stand to lose further.
So how? How do we celebrate when everything we’ve come to know and expect has changed? Holidays are largely built upon tradition and togetherness. I come from a huge Catholic family. And while I have abandoned the religious aspect of the holiday due to my personal beliefs, I greatly anticipate the tradition and togetherness that comes with each holiday, this one included. In my family, we are used to a table filled with lamb and ham, deviled eggs and endless desserts, salads and side dishes. We are used to getting dressed-up in new spring apparel, Easter egg hunts and baskets filled to the brim. We are used to a day well spent in each other’s presence, with laughter, good food, conversation and games.
How do we celebrate this one… in quarantine- when resources and groceries are so limited? And the faces we normally anticipate seeing are all isolated in their own homes… How do we create that sense of ritual when it feels like there is none?
It seems ironic with the happenings this year that this holiday’s roots are in re-birth after sacrifice.
So first, we must be willing to sacrifice. Sacrifice that extra trip to the store… sacrifice having all the food dishes and all the activities that we’ve had in years past, sacrifice some gifts, sacrifice sitting with and hugging our loved ones, knowing that that sacrifice leads to a greater good (remind you of anyone?… Our sacrifices sound pretty small next to his.)
And then we must search for another way… Another way to commune, another way to feast, another way to continue tradition.
My family is setting up a Zoom encounter to see one another tomorrow- to chat and perhaps even play one of our famous family games.
See my previous post on playing family games virtually: (Zoom, WhatsApp, Skype and the like, are amazing technologies that are FREE and can be downloaded on virtually any device. And they allow us to see one another, connect and commune, even if it’s in the virtual sense. So why not still get dressed-up and pick out a family game to play. Or, find the joy in being dressed-down this year, but enjoy each other’s company nonetheless.)
I’ve never had salmon for Easter. My brother always makes this amazing roasted leg of lamb and most of my family members have their signature dishes that they contribute-broccoli salad, homemade cakes and pies, maple bacon brussels sprouts, Jell-o salad… oh how I’m going to miss them! But salmon is the best meat I’ve got in the freezer right now and so I’m thankful to have it and for the reason to cook it. Honestly, it suddenly feels like the perfect choice to accompany the asparagus I have. And potatoes are a lock-down staple! No eggs though… I’m down to my last four. My mom has ham and is cooking for only two this year. So she’s going to do a porch drop off and share some with us. I wonder if others might consider sharing with their families and friends what they have as well…
As long as I have been a mother, I have always crafted Easter baskets for each of my children and filled them with loads of goodies. The “Easter bunny” hides them and on Easter morning, it’s a spring-time scavenger hunt to find their hidden treasures in the house. The Easter egg hunt comes later, when the family gathers and it’s held with all the cousins together.
I don’t have enough goodies to make individual baskets this year, much less to stuff eggs. That is partially due to what was available in the store and partially due to delayed shipments and finances. So I’ve settled on a family basket this year. We will search for it and enjoy it together. And instead of silly little toys, earbuds and socks, I managed to score two new family games to play at home, to replace the time we normally spend elsewhere.
And then we’re going to put in a family garden. It’s the season of fertility, after all.
Instead of dying eggs- because food conservation is a must, a dye kit isn’t worth it for four eggs, and quite frankly- my kids were never big fans of hard-boiled eggs anyway… we came up with a new idea! It started with my teenage daughter painting rocks to pass the time and then delivering “Smile!” eggs to neighbors as a random act of kindness. And now it has continued as an activity to recreate two time-honored traditions- dying and decorating eggs and the well-loved egg hunt.
This year, we are painting and hiding Stone Eggs!
We went on a family walk in the woods this morning, collecting rocks as we went.
Then we brought them home to wash and dry them.
And then we busted out our old paints and creative juices.
After they dried, we hand delivered them in a basket, to the yards and porches in the neighborhood. Little surprises left for the people around us. It’s like we got a turn at being the Easter bunny for once. I watched my almost 13 year old son, who is increasingly hard to excite these days, dart in and out of the yards to deliver our goods unseen, like a ninja… or an Easter bunny. On his face was pure joy and it shot straight to my heart. A perfect culmination of our day of family togetherness.
The irony that the eggs, a pagan symbol of fertility, are made of stone this year, like the stone rolled away from Jesus’s grave, didn’t escape me. I am a complicated bundle of everything that has made me who I am- loss of faith and a huge loving Catholic family all rolled together.
And I am at peace with that.
Just as I am at peace with this Easter unlike any other… an Easter where space might have divided us, but love kept us together. An Easter of sacrifice and giving to others. An Easter of new traditions created from old ones. An Easter of making do, of ingenuity and creativity, of grasping every bit of gratitude you can find and searching for goodness everywhere… even if it leads you to a neighbor’s porch, to a dried creek bed of rocks, to an empty tomb.
This is an of Easter with stone eggs.
There was another Easter that was very much unlike any other… it was the Easter that my grandmother died… read that post here:
