EASTER--NOW AND THEN...

 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.

                                                              

 EASTER

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        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….