I don’t like Easter.

When I was a child, Easter was not a very enjoyable holiday. I found the Easter bunny to be kind of creepy. I mean come on, a giant rabbit that breaks into your house to deliver Easter eggs and candy? Santa Claus I could understand because he was human. The Easter bunny was just too ridiculous to be believed.

On Easter day, I had to gussy up in really uncomfortable dress clothes for church. Unlike most Sundays, I had to stay in these clothes all day as we visited relatives and celebrated Easter. I couldn’t play rough house in these clothes, so my activities were limited.

As if having to wear fancy clothes were not enough, I couldn’t spend much time looking through my Easter basket because I’d have to go get ready for church. It was always an extra long church service on Easter Sunday. There would be more hymns, more scripture readings, and a really long drawn out sermon. On top of that, there would be communion. Unlike Catholics, Methodists do not take communion every Sunday. They save it for what they consider to be special occasions like Easter and Christmas. Being a kid, I could not take communion yet, so I had to sit quietly while the entire congregation made their way up to the altar. It was kind of like a stodgy Easter parade in which every one showed off their new Easter clothes.

After church, my family would drive an hour north to go visit my grandparents (still no getting into the Easter basket). My grandmother would make a nice Easter dinners with ham, scalloped potatoes, and a jello salad of some sort. As a kid, I was not very fond of ham, or for that matter, any meat that was not hamburger or hot dogs. There would also be Easter eggs. Tons and tons of hard-boiled, multi-colored Easter eggs. Looking back, I wonder just how safe that Easter egg dye really was.

Sometimes my cousins from Minnesota would come down to my grandparents to join us for Easter dinner. My cousins family was much more affluent than ours so they always scored big in the Easter candy department. They liked to rub this in. They would always point out how their chocolate Easter bunny was solid chocolate, whereas mine was hollow on the inside. Sometimes I hated my cousins.

During dinner, us kids would sit in the kitchen at the kids table. Since the adults were all in the other room, we were largely unsupervised. Dinner became less about eating and more about trying to gross each other out. You’d be surprised at the disgusting things you can do with half-chewed hard-boiled eggs, jello salad, and ham. I never ended up eating much at Easter dinner.

After dinner, we had to find ways to amuse ourselves while the adults talked. Being in our dress clothes, we were never allowed to do anything fun. My grandparent’s house was devoid of any toys or Atari, and television was off limits. Even worse, when the adults finally did turn the TV on in the evening, it was so they could watch Lawrence Welk.

Aside from Easter day itself, there were some other things I do not like about Easter either. I hate pastel colors. The pastel blues, pinks, and yellows of Easter make me want to puke. I do not like Easter lilies either. They remind me of flowers you would see at a funeral. Hardly a festive flower for a celebration, at least in my mind.

The day after Easter we always had to return to school after Easter vacation (as any good Protestant midwesterner called Spring Break). I can remember many Easter nights cramming to finish all the homework I had put off all week. Even today, I still get a pit in the bottom of my stomach on Easter evening as I am haunted by unfinished homework of years past.

From a religious aspect, I never really got Easter. Yeah sure, I understand the whole rising from the dead thing, but why one day? Shouldn’t spiritual events like Easter and Christmas be incorporated into our everyday lives instead of reserved for just one day a year? What makes Easter Sunday more holy than any other day of the year? The calendar has changed over the hundreds of years since then, so it is hardly the true anniversary of the original Easter.

Then comes the whole question raised by the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. Adults tell children fantastic stories about a rabbit that delivers eggs and a fat man that delivers toys in a sled pulled by reindeer. The stories must be true because Santa is everywhere you look at Christmastime, and you can go visit the Easter bunny in the local shopping mall. They also tell children about Jesus rising from the dead after being nailed to a cross. That story must be true too because we go to church every Sunday. When two out of the three of the stories turn out to be a elaborate hoax, how does that leave a kid feeling about the Easter story? Is it really any less ludicrous sounding?

All in all, I would just as soon skip Easter.

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