Like most pagan/heathen children, as a kid I figured that, stripped of its incomprehensible pretensions, the point of Easter was to feed me many bright and wonderful forms of sugar. That an entire holiday was (by one means or another) devoted to this splendid end seemed to me natural and right.
I had bad teeth and a right leg I could never stop from vibrating, but I wasn’t entirely dense. Besides the thrilling annual ritual of ignoring Peeps and hording jelly beans, I knew Easter also had something to do with Christ on the cross, or Christ popping back out of the ground, or Christ floating up behind people and saying “Boo!”, or something. I wasn’t sure. I was sure that in one way or another Christ was heavily associated with guilt—a guilt which I myself felt acutely when cradling in my hands an unwrapped, still unchomped chocolate bunny.
I was also aware that Easter was a time to be even more grateful than usual that I wasn’t a girl, since on Easter girls had to wear ribbons, dresses that looked like they’d actually slice up your legs, and shiny black shoes a vice couldn’t bend.
Poor girls. Dolls. Hair they had to brush. Aversion to mud. The inhumanity!
Now I’m a Christian, and no longer associate Easter with jelly beans, chocolate, and frightfully indestructible Peeps.
I see out my window just now that my neighbors are up early this morning. They’re hiding in the grass around their place brightly colored plastic eggs filled with what I can only imagine are Hershey’s Kisses and jelly beans.
Once they go back inside I should probably run out there, just to be sure they did put candy in those in those eggs. I hate to see disappointed children.
My parents missed out on Easter. They didn’t get it.
Happy Easter from their infinitely luckier son.
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