So, I’m not great at “doing” holidays. My mom does holidays, and she’s amazing at it. Her mom and, from what I have heard, her mom’s mom were/are big holiday do-ers, too. I remember the “Easter tree” at Granny’s house, and hunting those little plastic eggs all over the yard with my cousins. We had Easter bonnets and Easter songs. For my kids…not so much.
My mom and step-dad came to dye eggs with us on Wednesday. It was his first time. That surprised me–not that he hadn’t done it as a kid (he is Jewish), but that he’s been with my mom for kind of a while and I thought she would have made it happen by now. Mom then made an Easter e-card/collage with the photos she took that day, and sent it to friends and family.
Oh, and she brought Silas an Easter game and taught him the song. See what I mean? Doing Easter.
It wasn’t just Easter that my mom did. I remember shamrock headbands for St. Patrick’s Day and flag shirts on the Fourth of July. She taught my brother all about April Fool’s and wondered how he kept getting her with the same prank, year after year (rubber band on the vegetable sprayer, for the curious). She always reported on the groundhog’s shadow. We made little paper pilgrim hats and Indian headdresses–when I was in college. She did this all in a pre-Pinterest age, too.
I’m not good at “doing” holidays. Those genes entirely skipped me. When I say this, it sounds like I mean that I don’t want to be that way, or I think it’s silly. To the contrary, I remember those holidays as a lot of fun. I wish I could do that, for my kids. If you celebrate every holiday you meet, your whole life can be a party. When I say I don’t “do” holidays, it’s more like someone who says they have a black thumb. They are not scorning your garden–maybe they envy it. They are just commenting that this is a gift they lack.
All that is to say, I didn’t even get Petra a cute Easter dress. Silas wore the white button-down that I got him for a wedding last year, and a tie for about five minutes.
Easter baskets operated on a theory of repackaging stuff the kids had been ignoring, especially if it was Easter-y. I put in a few toys I picked up at a swap last month, pulled out some Silas baby toys that Petra hadn’t seen yet, and found a porcelain bunny that was mine when I was little.
I surrounded the whole thing with every rabbit-related book I could find.
How is this not “doing” Easter baskets? Well, if my mom had done it, she would have probably made them up with the cellophane and the Easter grass that gets everywhere and kills your cat and/or vacuum cleaner. There would have been significantly more candy, in little plastic eggs. I don’t know what else, it just would have been artful.
Silas, not knowing any better, had no complaints.
He either did not remember or did not care that he had seen most of the stuff before.
The one totally new item was a collection of geometric solids for Petra. They have many uses, as you can see.
We had a beautiful service at church, and not that many people dressed their kids up especially much. Mennonites are low-key like that.
The scripture reading was my favorite verse, which was a pleasant surprise.
The worship arts committee had taken stories of shame that people had shared throughout Lent and turned them into butterflies. They have that gift, too, and I’m grateful to them for sharing it.
It the past, we have hosted a “widows and orphans” dinner–an open invitation to anyone who didn’t have a dinner to go to. We have many joyful memories of those dinners, some successful, some rather failed. I completely forgot about that until Friday afternoon, at which point it felt like something I couldn’t even think about putting together. Instead, we had leftovers, en famille.
Not a bad holiday, for people who don’t do holidays…but next year, I will at least get this little girl something fluffy to wear.
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