Easter time musings

As a child, I used to love Easter.  There was a solemnness about it that made it different from Christmas with its joyous lead-up to an exciting occasion.  I wasn’t too sure why, but I loved the peacefulness.   Easter was quieter, much more low-key and didn’t entail a huge family dinner.  What it did have, every time without fail, were hot-cross buns and an Easter egg.  Sometimes it was a big (in my eyes) chocolate Easter egg, and sometimes it was the smaller one which only cost 6d and was wrapped in bright coloured tinfoil that you could smooth out carefully and make pretend butterflies from.  I didn’t ever like the big hollow Easter eggs as they were just that – hollow.  Empty.  And just rather dull.  But the squashy marshmallow eggs were a treat worth waiting for.

As I grew older and the Christian meaning of Easter became apparent, Easter took on a new meaning and one which took a bit of understanding as it stood for both death, and rebirth.  Chickens and rabbits became woven into the whole fabric of Easter and although it was not the season of Spring in our land, there were certainly plenty of rabbits and autumnal hatched chickens.  Easter now became something to do with the essence of life, but the eating of Easter eggs was still greatly favoured in our house.

Older still, and the reality of the Easter story and the part played by the Church meant understanding the Biblical stories of Christ and their relevance in today’s society.  Easter became a season divided into a secular society celebrating the Spring equinox and the Christian society celebrating the resurrection of Christ.  It was a time of learning the differences between secular and religious communities, and between Christianity and other religions.

But there were still Easter eggs, and hot cross buns and, now, a greater understanding of what the holiday was all about.

Then came marriage and babies.  One of the babies had Prader-Willi Syndrome and quite suddenly things like Christmas and Easter became food festivals to be treated with greatest caution.  For weeks before the Easter holiday, shops and supermarkets were gaily festooned with Easter eggs, each year getting bigger and bigger, more and more outlandish.  No longer just hollow eggs, these were filled with even more chocolate.  There were rabbits, chickens, and all sorts of figures made out of chocolate: chocolate money, chocolate cakes, birds’ nests, birds’ eggs, all variety of birds and rabbits to make shopping a nightmare.  The whole Easter egg thing became a competition about who got the most, and kids would be eating them at school long before Easter hove into view.

What was I going to do?  By now there were three children and the one with PW was the youngest.  The oldest were used to the tradition of an Easter egg – more from grandparents, aunts, uncles and so on – and now, well, was I going to have to ban this?  I had to start somewhere, so I persuaded the wider family not to give our children chocolate eggs, but if they felt they had to give something, to do it when the youngest was not around.  We introduced the idea that our chickens laid eggs and on Easter Sunday there would be one special egg – and happily they did!  Easter, like Christmas, slowly became more low-key, still celebrated, but without the emphasis on food.

Time has rolled on, and around the corner Easter is waiting again.  My daughter (the one with PW) amazed me the other day by saying she thought this year she would prefer an Easter bun rather than an Easter egg.  Not sure whether that will be a statement set in concrete, in fact I strongly suspect it is a ploy to have both, but whichever, you can be sure that if you ask her for a bite of either, she will willingly share it.  I rather think many others of our extended PW family are the same and that strong streak of generosity is in all.

Perhaps you are already buying up the Easter eggs and Easter buns, ready for the festivity?  Perhaps, this year, you would donate the cost of a few eggs to IPWSO so that we can continue to help those families in great need?  You can go to our Easter Appeal (click on "Sponsor") to donate.   We would be so grateful for your support!