Today is Good Friday. We went to church last evening and will go tonight and again on Easter Sunday. When I was a kid, “Easter” was on Sunday and we dressed up and went to church. I don’t remember any events or special days leading up to Easter. I heard of Lent and kind of knew what it was, but we didn’t “observe” it — same with Good Friday… I knew what Good Friday was, but there was no special observance of the day.
Easter wasn’t a particularly special holiday in our family — we were always happy for it to come around because it was sort of the beginning of spring. But, when I was a kid, like most special occasions, there were not really any “traditions” associated with Easter. You didn’t go to the mall to visit the Easter Bunny — that came after I was older… in fact malls came after I was older. I remember that we did usually color eggs, but I don’t remember participating in that activity much — it was usually done mostly by my mom. We usually did get a gift of some kind from the Easter Bunny — often times it was a live bunny, chick or duck. And we did go to church on Easter Sunday dressed, almost always, in some new clothes. We had a small family and I remember going to one of our grandparents’ house for Christmases and Thanksgivings but I don’t remember “family” gatherings on Easter.
So other than just rambling on about what I remember about Easter when I was young, I guess the point here is that we didn’t really have any Easter traditions. I don’t know that that’s either good or bad — it’s just the way it was. Of course if you think about it, traditions are really just the past. So maybe whatever we did could be considered a tradition. But I once heard that cultures grow on the vine of tradition… so based on that, I’d say we didn’t have Easter traditions, we just observed Easter.
No matter how you celebrate — Happy Easter.
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