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It's (Almost) Easter 2004-04-04, 11:47 a.m. Easter is one of my favorite holidays for some very ridiculous reasons. I believe that Easter has, hands down, the best holiday candy. Peeps are available year-round now, it seems, but they are an Easter candy and that is when they are supposed to be consumed. No pumpkin Peeps or candy cane Peeps for me. I want bunnies and chicks and eggs and they should be in obscenely bright pink, purple, blue, and yellow colors. Then there are Cadbury crème eggs (Caramel! Chocolate crème!), Reese’s eggs, teeny tiny chocolate bunnies from Dove and Ghirardelli, plastic Easter eggs full of candy, and the list goes on and on. It’s an excellent candy holiday, but the Healthy Me, of course, is trying really damn hard to not buy a six-pack of Reese’s eggs and to run past the Cadbury aisle at Target. I also like Easter because it’s a spiritual holiday with interesting tradition in my family. We used to meet in the middle for a baseball game every Easter, but this year, the Cardinals are away and our six-year tradition of hot dogs and Resurrection is taking a break. This year, I’m taking three days off work (FINALLY, a vacation) because all three of us are going home and we are going to be merry and eat healthfully and nap a lot and since my kitties are going too, there will be four cats to annoy and spoil and tease. In reality, there will probably be fighting and too much tempting food and a bigass ham for Easter dinner even though I cannot stand ham at all and my mom will feel sorry for me and make me a grilled chicken breast instead and then everybody else will whine about how they don’t like the potatoes so can’t you please make me some fries, and I hate beans so could you please get me a cookie instead and my mom will give up and get five spoons and we will eat ice cream straight from the container. In lieu of baseball, we’ll probably watch movies, play board games, and tell stories. We’ll get up early on Sunday morning and go to the Sunrise Service and the youth group breakfast at my hometown church, and then we’ll drive back to the town where my parents live now and go back to sleep, and we’ll stumble out of bed one by one and find my dad in his chair reading the Easter story, and we’ll each take a turn at picking the Bible up to read through the gospels privately. And then we’ll probably walk to the local hamburger stand and eat hot dogs and onion rings and fruity slushees and wish that all of us lived closer to home and that a job would fall out of thin air for me and school would hurry up and finish for Punk and Scoot, and that we would be close enough to each other to gather for Easter dinners with our kids in ten or fifteen years and to gather again with each other in 2005. My mom’s eyes will well with tears on Sunday night when she realizes that in twelve hours, she’ll have an empty house again. My dad will try to joke about how the water bill will spike from the extra showers and all of the cooking, and how he’ll be able to walk through his house without tripping on extra cats and shoes and suitcases, but then he’ll choke up mid-sentence and just say that he’s glad we’re all there and somehow, it is never said aloud, but we all know that we’re glad to be there together and that there truly is no place like home.
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