Yesterday was Easter.
It was a very quiet day--just my husband and me. We watched the televised General Conference broadcast for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and took Easter greetings to the nine women in my congregation to whom I minister and to the recent widow who lives across the street.
Our Easter dinner was toasted cheese sandwiches. Nice and simple but totally lacking in the spirit of Easter celebration I had participated in or organized for over seven decades. Truthfully, though it was a spiritual day, it seemed lacking when it came to the CELEBRATION part. I longed for the family dinner and the cheery association with parents, children and grandchildren as I remember, not only as a kid, but as an adult and parent and grandparent in my own right.
This is an article I wrote for the Newsletter I wrote for my children over a ten-year period. The Nichols Family News was compiled of memories garnered from journals, conversations, and printed pieces from all kinds of sources. It is still good reading. And I hope my posterity finds some interest in those ten years of effort which I so immensely enjoyed compiling.
This piece is a look into some self-introspection on my part. I wrote it in April 2011.
I loved Easter as a kid! I especially liked it when it was at its very
latest—like it is this year, the fourth Sunday in April. By the end of April maybe—just maybe, we
hoped—the weather might be a little milder in Wyoming, and it would seem like a
“real” spring holiday. The only “Spring
Break” we had was Good Friday, which everybody got out of school to
celebrate. When I was in junior high and
high school, we also had no school on Easter Monday. So, we had a four-day weekend for a spring
break. That’s the main reason I liked
Easter to be the latest date possible. I
wanted it to be fairly good weather during that precious long weekend.
Plenty
of years we wore our new lightweight and gauzy Easter dresses and new patent
leather shoes to Church in snow. Or else
it was so chilly we had to wear heavy coats over our frilly new dresses. Back then, dressing up for Easter Sunday was
a big deal. We saw people at Church who
never darkened the door any other time of the year, except Christmas, who came
to show off their Easter finery. We
always had Easter baskets, dyed eggs, and generally enjoyed the secular aspects
of celebrating the end of winter. We
didn’t think too much about celebrating Easter the way true Saints celebrate
the Atonement and Resurrection of Christ.
Frankly, I was confused about the relationship between all the Easter
stuff we did and Christ’s death and resurrection.
It
didn’t occur to me until Harold and Brice were little, that I should be
teaching my children that Easter was an occasion for gratitude. Because of Christ, not only would we all be resurrected
but through his atonement we could be forgiven, be comforted, and be succored
in any way we needed. So, I began to separate the fun, worldly aspects of
Easter from the more reverent celebration of the end of Christ’s earthly
ministry. Along with the Easter
decorations, I tacked up a little verse on the kitchen door of the Welch Court
house which outlined Christ’s resurrection making it possible for all of us to
live again. I would repeat it to Harold
and Brice, and then when I would ask them why we celebrated Easter, they would
parrot back to me that Jesus died so we could live again. We saved the Easter egg hunt, the sugar-cookie
making, and dying eggs for the day after Easter until they began school, then
we moved that part back to Saturday. (It
was during that time Ross fashioned the huge egg cookie cutter we used for
years. I still have it.) The FHE before Easter I always gave the lesson about
Easter customs and what eggs, bunnies, lambs, new clothes, etc. have to do with
the celebration of Easter anyway. That prepared us to make Easter Sunday a
special occasion.
I
used to make sure everyone had something new to wear until I don’t remember
when that wasn’t important anymore. But,
there were years I even made the clothes myself. There are pictures of Harold and Brice in new
outfits I made. And, maybe Burgandy
remembers the blue and white polka dot dress with a blue and white pinstripe
pinafore I made her. She also had a cute
white straw hat to wear with the dress.
I
have a lot of great memories of Easter over the last six-plus decades. There are boxes in the basement still full of
Easter stuff from Berlin and lots of doodads I have bought and collected
through the years for our own Nichols Family Easter celebrations. And, I would hazard a guess that there are
about two-hundred plastic eggs that would make for a really GRAND Easter egg
hunt. So, if you’re ever around….
