On beyond bunnies

It helps to be an adult at Easter.

As kids, it didn’t take us long to figure out holidays. Fireworks on the Fourth of July. Trick or treats meant Halloween. Then there was that hours-long drive to eat dry turkey and lumpy potatoes with relatives we really didn’t like much…  Memorial Day meant school’s out, summer’s here! Labor Day was back to school – who in heck figured anybody’d want to celebrate that? But when it came to holidays – at least in white, Christian America – two definitely claimed top billing  – Christmas and Easter, and of those two, the one featuring the fat fellow with the flying sled, packed to the gunwales with Lincoln Logs, Tonka Trucks and a pair of genuine Roy Rogers cap-firing six-shooters stood boots and fir trees over the wandering rabbit that pooped jelly beans and hard-cooked eggs.

Yeah, in a kid’s holiday trifecta – Christmas, Halloween and Easter – Easter made it to show only because Valentine’s Day was way too mushy and none of the other holidays involved much in the way of candies or presents. Even so, that springtime candy-fest faced no small struggle to stay in the good graces of the grammar school set.

First off, nobody ever knew just when it was going to be. Every other holiday had its regular red number permanently set on the calendar – turkey day wandered a bit but was always reliably in the middle of the week there at the end of November – close enough for a fifth grader. Easter, on the other hand wandered all over a quarter of the calendar turning up who knows when for who knows what reason. Any kid knows, if there’s one thing a holiday should be, it’s reliable.

And reliable in a good way. Easter was lacking in that department as well.

Now there’s always a build up to any holiday worth its celebration. You have to figure out a costume for Halloween; fall in love for Valentine’s Day. Christmas has Advent and, of course, if there’s gonna be Easter, ya gotta get through Lent – and that gets Bunny Day off to a bad start right there.

Contrast the traditional Advent calendar – a little sweet treat every day for the four weeks leading up to Christmas Eve -- highlighting four weeks of filling up cookie jars, countertops laden with pans of fudge, almond bark and divinity with crystal dishes of holiday hard candy set out, unguarded on every end table – with Lent’s lead up to Easter.

Tuna hotdish and fish sticks on Friday, give up six episodes of your favorite TV show and spend every Wednesday night in church…

All so you can be rousted out of a deep sleep in the morning dark of Easter Sunday; be gussied up in a starched white shirt, clip-on tie and brand-new shiny black leather shoes that slip when you walk, pinch while you sit and will never be worn while doing anything remotely fun. All this to get to church at the butt-crack of dawn to get the Good Lord out of bed so you can eat cold scrambled eggs and limp bacon in the church basement, nursing a freshly bruised thigh from the pinches Mom delivered to keep you awake and not wiggling through a too-long sermon and a couple off-key choir anthems.

When you’re eight-years-old, the hollow chocolate bunny and hard-boiled eggs waiting for you at home hardly makes it worth the suffering.

But little do you know you’ll see a lot more suffering as even the best of lives unfolds.

Little do we know, when we’re eight-years-old, how Easter can guide our dealing with that. How the Lents in our lives will eventually end and the good things we’d missed and feared would never come again do come again. And while eggs and jelly beans may not be as spectacular as Lincoln Logs or Tonka Trucks, they are good things and good things to give thanks for. And how good it is to know that.

To always know that.

Even if getting to know that takes a bit of growing up…