This Easter is shaping up to be one of the quietest Easters ever and that’s okay. Actually, it’s better than okay. It’s just what I need.
Easters Past
Growing up, Easters were a big deal. My mom would take me shopping for an Easter dress and matching shoes. Of course, being the 1960s and 1970s it also meant a matching hat, gloves, and socks or stockings. Sometimes our family would have matching outfits, like that year in the early 70s when we had matching leisure suits. Do you remember those?
The day before Easter, my mom, brother and I would color Easter eggs for the big Easter Egg hunt at my grandparents’ house. They were often quite elaborate and we would always color one a solid green just because. Mom would put my straight hair in curlers with a healthy dose of Dippity-Do so that I would have a respectable hairstyle to match my Easter finery.
We found a basket full of chocolate candy and other Easter trinkets when we woke up on Easter morning.
We would go to church together and then congregate at my grandparents’ home for Easter lunch and the egg hunt. The lunch was delicious-ham, mac and cheese, peas, sweet potatoes, rolls, and coconut cake or pound cake for dessert. Most years it was my grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins, usually around twenty people. Sometimes additional family and friends would join us and the crowd would swell to thirty or forty. (My family has a tendency to do things big).
After lunch, the uncles would hide the eggs in my grandparents’ yard. They really did have the best yard for Easter Egg hunts. After carefully counting the found eggs we almost always came up short by one or two. We learned from experience that you did not want to find those too much after Easter.
Times Change
Our extended family grew, changing with marriages, divorces, moves, and another generation of cousins. We continued celebrating Easter with my grandmother after my grandfather died in 1984 and did so until she died in 2008, the year my son was a freshman in college. I love the fact that my own children grew up having Easter lunch with family and hunting Easter eggs in the same place that I did decades earlier.
After my grandmother died, our celebration got smaller. In some ways, I think she was holding things together.
For a few years, my mom’s sister and her family and our family would share Easter dinner at our club’s restaurant. But for the past few years, it has been me, my husband, and my parents, either at home or the beach. Last year was the first Easter without my dad. My daughter came home to be with us but my mother wasn’t feeling well so we were down to three for Easter lunch. This year, it’s just the two of us. My first Easter without my mom.
You might say we’ve gone back to the beginning and the way things were, but we really haven’t. I was always accustomed to a house full of family for all the holidays.
Easter Today
It’s ok though. Sure, I would love a big gathering of family with a home-cooked meal followed by an Easter egg hunt. I would love to color some eggs again. But there is something quiet, serene, and peaceful about celebrating Easter at the beach with my husband. To worship at our little island church on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. I think it’s exactly what I need this year.
I should add it doesn’t hurt that I spent time with my adult kids and grandson in Nashville this past weekend.
How about you? How did you celebrate Easter this year? Was it different from Easters past? I would love to hear.
Happy Easter to you and yours. May you find joy in celebrating this Resurrection Sunday.
Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!
Kim Wilbanks 