I’m wary of writing about religion, and though I want to say a word about Easter and Passover here, you’ll see that the following has more to do with saturated fats than Christianity or Judaism.
I was raised in a family that qualified as the Worst Catholics in the World. We didn’t go to church because my mother was excommunicated, since she had been divorced before she married my father. And if my mother wasn’t going to church, none of us was. As a child, I understood only that the Church didn’t like my mother, and since I loved her, I was on her side. So for me, Easter was about chocolate.
And plastic.
What I remember about Easter morning was that my brother Frank and I got a pink plastic basket full of green plastic grass. Nestled within were chocolate eggs from Woolworth’s, cream-filled, and a huge chocolate bunny, unfortunately hollow, because we were on the low-rent side.
I feel nostalgic for those multi-colored mornings, for neon-orange peanuts and chrome-yellow Peeps. For fat jellybeans, from before there were “gourmet” jellybeans that taste like popcorn or daiquiris, which is against nature. When I was little, all jellybeans tasted the same.
Like sugar, as God intended.
The only jellybeans I really wanted were the cherry ones that washed your teeth in a scary red juice, or the licorice ones that blackened your tongue like a chow’s.
We also got dressed up on Easter morning, and there are plenty of pictures of me looking stiff in a crinoline dress and brother Frank in a little gray suit, a red bowtie, and short pants with knee socks, topped off with a round cap that had a chin strap. Much later, we would learn that Frank was gay, and I still maintain we should have been tipped off by that Easter get-up.
I can get nostalgic about every Easter memory but the spray-painted chick. Spray-painted chicks were a big thing in my old neighborhood. I still can’t imagine what anybody was thinking, to do something so cruel as to take a live baby chick and dye it an “Easter” color. But my parents fell for this every year and they’d buy us a red, green, or purple chick. The novelty would wear off in an hour, not coincidentally with the sugar crash, and then nobody seemed to know what to do with the poor chick.
Our red chick and our green chick died in short order, but the purple chick, against all odds, didn’t die after the first week. Or even the second. Of course, we had no idea how to raise him. We fed him Cheerios and meatballs. We covered the floor of our bedroom with newspaper and kept him there. In time, he lost his purple feathers and grew to be a chubby brown chicken, whom we named Herman. He had a friendly personality, hanging out with us and walking through our legs like a house cat. He lived a full year, and when he died, we cried so hard that it made Easter the anniversary of his death, rather than the resurrection of anything else.
When I got older, we moved to a neighborhood that was predominantly Jewish. I got invited to bar and bat mitzvahs, and I learned that Jews celebrated Passover. My best friend Rachel kept the traditional fast on the first day. I didn’t understand Judaism much better than I understood Catholicism, but her family invited me to their seder, where I had a great time and got to ask a question, which I didn’t understand either.
But what I did understand about Passover was that Rachel’s family was together around a full and lovely table-two wonderful parents, three fun-loving brothers, and my best friend in the world-all joking around with each other, laughing, and inviting me into their family. And to this day, I still am in their family, as they are in mine.
To me, that’s what every holiday is all about.
That’s even what every religion is about.
Love.