This post was previously published on April 19, 2019.
Good morning all!
So Sunday is Easter, which means if you celebrate Easter, you're probably spending a good part of today looking for that bottle of white vinegar that you "KNOW" you bought last year for egg coloring.
Easter, possibly more than most holidays, has some odd traditions. Much like chili recipes, holiday traditions vary from family to family and I'm sure it's no shock that my family has some distinct, odd, ways to celebrate our risen Savior. (Because, remember, Easter is a religious celebration...which makes the whole rabbit thing a head scratcher for me.)
Here are my family's top 5 Easter traditions:
5) Sunrise ChurchI understand that Lent is the season of preparation and sacrifice. And I also understand that those of us who give things up for Lent are eager to get a jump on eating/drinking/doing whatever it is we gave up. That said, who came up with Easter Sunrise Service?
For those of you not familiar, this is the Easter practice where the first service (and most popular) of Easter Sunday typical kicks off at some ungodly hour, like 6 AM. Or maybe 7 AM (when I was a teacher in a parochial school, the pastor said, "Sunrise can happen at any time in the rest of the world, but here sunrise is 7 AM.") Either way, it's early. EARLY. My earliest and most vivid memories of Easter involve NOT getting watch "Emergency" the night before (because it aired at 8 PM and that would keep us kids up until 9 PM EST and getting us up for 6 AM church would then be impossible. So we actually wound up going to bed when it was still light out. Oh yeah, we fell asleep RIGHT AWAY. Also, my parents took that extra time to hide the eggs. And, since we weren't asleep, there was a lot of yelling. But I'll get to that later.) Also, getting up that early, my mother was not...at her best. Not a coffee drinker, my mother could only rely on her natural energy to get her into a day. Prepping two kids for church at 5 AM (Because my parents sang in the choir, we had to be there even earlier) my mom had a tendency to be a touch...um...grumpy. Heaven help my brother and me if we inadvertently found an Easter egg while gulping down a bowl of cereal. That would ignite a howl from my mother. "STOP LOOKING FOR EGGS WE ARE GOING TO BE LATE FOR CHURCH!"
Of course, once I was a parent, I was no better on this point. I joined the church choir, we dragged our kids to that Sunrise service. In fact, this year will be the FIRST TIME in my life I'm not going to a Sunrise service. Nope, the church I go to right now has a 10:15 service and I'll be bright eyed and bushy tailed for that!
4) Hiding the eggs
My father is a man of numbers and stats. He loves keeping exact time on all of his clocks. He makes lists. He ranks baseball and football teams according to power rankings. No, not the ranking the leagues give the teams, his own algorithm. He is the reason I know what time it is in almost every country in the world, because time zones are very important to him.
And it was this attention to fact tracking and stats that made our Easter egg hunts so...horrible.
See, my parents would hide a random number of eggs each year. And we had a limited time to find them. We had roughly forty minutes to find our eggs and baskets between the time we got home from church and the time we had to load into the car for the drive from Michigan to Wisconsin to see relatives for the long school vacation.
Not knowing how many eggs we had to find was one thing. Little kids don't care. But the real torment came when we'd find several eggs and both our baskets and we were ready to dive into the candy when my father would say, "You have three more eggs to find." He'd be standing there, all tall (He's 6'4") with his CLIPBOARD on which was a list of eggs and where they'd hidden them.
This could go on for anywhere up to an hour. Which would mean we'd be late getting our start on our trip. Which would anger my mother for reasons I still don't understand. It's not like she was ever going to drive the car on that trip from Flint, MI to Jefferson, WI. That was a drive that took 8 hours and forced us through Chicago...the place Midwesterners all hate to drive. ("Did you get stuck in Chicago?" "Oh no, I went around Chicago.")
Oh, and also we weren't allowed to touch the candy in our basket until we'd found all the eggs. Since our mother was anti-sugar, candy was something we didn't see more than 2x per year: Halloween and Easter.
Yep, there we were, my mother furious that we were late, my brother and me screaming because we couldn't find the eggs, and my father, the always calm man, with his clip board telling us, "You have four more eggs to find."
This would ultimately fire off a random ransacking of the house. We'd dig through the flour and sugar bins, yank thinks out of the fridge, turn over furniture. Meanwhile, my mother would be sitting in a chair, exhausted and cranky, muttering something about leaving the house for a week looking like animals lived there. Every few minutes she'd yell, "Dennis, just tell them where the eggs are!" And he'd say, "Then they don't get the candy in their basket." And we'd yell, "NO, WE WILL FIND THE EGGS!"
Sure, we found the eggs. Failure was not an option, since we were promised that any egg we didn't find we'd have to eat once we got back from Wisconsin.
When I was ten we moved from Michigan to Wisconsin and it was decided we were too old for Easter egg hunts. Doesn't seem quite fair to my younger brother, but I'm fairly certain that was a battle my mother won.
3) Church. Every. Single. Day.
Growing up devout Lutheran is not all that different from growing up any other religion if your parents are hard core about following the rules. That meant that Holy Week was church, church, and nothing but church for us.
Lent already meant extra church on Wednesday nights. I didn't mind it so much when I was a kid because it meant a later bed time (I hated my 8 PM bed time from a very young age. I've always been a night owl.) and it meant donuts after church. I'm not sure who came up with this practice, but donuts, coffee, and being Lutheran is the second trinity just below Father/Son/Holy Ghost and just above, Casseroles/potlucks/free will offering baskets. (Yep, we Lutherans have a trinity of trinities.) Every Wednesday night during Lent we did church and then donuts. And there were two rooms for donuts: The adult room and the kid room. Generally my brother and I went to the adult room where my parents made an appearance, ate one donut, and then got us home before we got "too wound up" so we'd be in bed as close to 8 Pm as possible. (Honestly, my mother was militant about that bed time.) We BEGGED to go to the kid room. It seemed so...fun. So after years of listening to us whine about it, my parents let us hit the kid room.
One time was all we needed. The games were fine, but they only let us have HALF A DONUT. HALF A DONUT? Nope, we were back in the adult room the next week.
I digress. So after five weeks of extra church, we get to Holy Week...which is EXTRA EXTRA church. Palm Sunday. Maundy Thursday. Good Friday. Easter Sunday. (And, if you had it offered at your church, Saturday Vigil.) What kind of super torment was this for kids? And it wasn't like church is now when you could just go in the clothes you're wearing. Nope, you had CHURCH CLOTHES. This was especially awful on Good Friday because we had school for half a day, then church at noon and then we were off for a week. We had to wear our CHURCH CLOTHES to school with the command from Mom, "If you go out for recess and get these clothes dirty before church you're going to lose TV for a week." (That was her go-to punishment. It was very effective for me.) Now, the upside to going to a parochial school was that we weren't the only ones in church clothes on Good Friday. Nope, all the kids in my school showed up in church clothes and spent morning recess standing very still, not getting dirty.
As a parent, yes, I did all the church services with the kids, because why wouldn't I? I was a bit looser on the whole "Church clothes" thing though. I believe God doesn't care what you look like as long as you're there. Although...no, we are a little lax with our mid week attendance. Okay, we're really lax.
2) The Easter Bunny
Um, we didn't do the Easter Bunny. Just like we didn't do Santa.
To be fair, we only had one car, and we didn't live near a mall where there was an Easter Bunny. So the whole legend of the rabbit is not in my memory. Although...looking at these pics, I don't think I was missing much:
What...the...heck where people thinking? I saw the mall rabbit at our mall the other day and I thought, why do we do this? We tell kids, "Don't talk to strangers" and then we dump them on the lap of some mall employee in a costume?
Which is why we, the Bradley family, have our own LEGEND OF THE NAUGHTY EASTER RODENT.
This started because, being poor folk like we are, if the kids wanted a specific pair of fancy shoes, we couldn't just buy them, they had to be for a special reason, like Easter. So each Easter Sunday, before sunrise church, I'd put the shoes boxes out in front of their rooms with the new shoes. The explanation was that the Naughty Easter Rodent had hidden our colored eggs and this was his way of saying, "Sorry." Then, when we got home from church, in the hour we had before we had to go to grandma's (sound familiar) we'd have to find the eggs and baskets.
The tradition is now a bit simpler since the kids are adults. We don't do baskets anymore. Now we put shoe boxes on each chair around the dinner table. It's not candy and shoes anymore, it's small things like a DVD or maybe a jar of exotic honey Peaches wants for a baking project. Or that terrible candied ginger Hubby likes. But someday...someday I'm going to have grandkids. And then I will again share the full legend of the naughty Easter Rodent.
1) Tips and Butts
How this battle of boiled eggs came to be I'll never know. But on my dad's side of the family (which was the more whimsical side. My mother's side didn't "play with their food" EVER) did this every year around my grandmother's giant dining room table. Maybe it was because we were wedged into her tiny dining room, unable to move because the table was actually too big for the room. Maybe it was because we only got together 3x a year and we were loathe to leave the warmth of the family table. Maybe it's because by the time an Easter egg gets to Easter Sunday, it's barely food and really better for sport than eating. Who knows?
I've written about Tips and Butts before, but I'll go over the rules again: Two people pick an egg each. They hold the eggs with the tips (narrow end) pointed toward each other, one egg above the other. They say, "go" and the upper egg smashes against the lower egg. They then flip the eggs to the butt (wider) end, and flip positions. The upper egg again smashes against the lower egg. The winner is the one whose ends are intact. The winner of the battle is the one who is holding an unsmashed end at the conclusion of the battle.
My grandmother made multiple dozens of eggs, decorated beautifully and piled high on crystal platters. Those eggs, nestled in green plastic Easter grass, taunted us kids. Tips and Butts was the best part of ANY dinner!
The only person who didn't participate was my Uncle Bob who sat at the end of the table. When an egg had both ends smashed, we'd pass it down to Uncle Bob who would peel it and, salt shaker in hand, would eat more than he would put back on the platter. Whatever peeled eggs made it past him would wind up in a faintly pink or blue colored egg salad the next day.
Friends, no matter what kind of celebration you have this weekend:
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| Secular |
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| Old world traditional |
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religious
let it be a joyful celebration! Happy Easter to all!
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