They say it’s the period leading up to Easter, Lent, when you’re supposed to do without. You give up something. Drinking or butterscotch ripple ice cream or Ryan Murphy productions.
Okay none of those is a sacrifice to me. No suffering involved. Do they even still make butterscotch ripple? I was always a bad parishioner.
Too often for me, I give up something for Easter instead. Interaction, say.
Normally, I’m good. I spent this long weekend hunting down cherry blossoms for photos while going on bike rides and a jog. I went to Vancouver’s Van Dusen Gardens to wander amongst early rhododendrons and other flowers. I did short writing sessions in cafés. I even had coffee with a friend I hadn’t seen in almost two years.
But it was Easter. BIG expectations. In Canada, it’s a four-day weekend for people who aren’t in the service industry. Good Friday is a holiday. Easter Monday is a holiday. No, there are no egg hunts on Monday and no special meals aside from leftover ham and maybe some colorful eggs reduced to egg salad. Or maybe just a chocolate breakfast, assuming the candy eggs and Costco-sized white chocolate bunny survived Easter Sunday. Really, who just eats an ear and says, “I’m good”? Even if it’s white chocolate, it is chocolate.
Okay, being Easter and all, I feel like I’m in a confessing kind of space. Not only did I NOT give up anything for Lent (other than nonexistent butterscotch ripple), I do NOT partake in tearing apart chocolate Easter bunnies, piece by piece. I do not even eat half the little chocolate eggs before the hunt and sit back to say, “I bought two whole bags. You’re just not looking hard enough.” Mean? Sure. But the neighbour’s kid screams through dinnertime every evening…and neither walls nor doors constitute an effective sound barrier.
I do not like chocolate.
Yes, go on. Gasp. Call me a freak. That gut reaction just cut you out of being on the re-gifting list for when people give me chocolate.
I do admit to one exception. I’ve discovered Trader Joe’s Milk Chocolate Covered Peanut Butter Pretzels and I will NOT be giving them away. It will take me several sittings over a few weeks to get through them because the milk chocolate overwhelms the rest of the flavors. I have confirmed it smothers a teeny tiny pretzel bit but I have yet to taste any trace of peanut butter.
At any rate, I won’t be stocking up on my one chocolate exception since I am not making cross-border runs to Trader Joe’s due to Trump’s tariffs and his belittling references to Canada as the 51st state. (Focus on Puerto Rico, dude.)
If Easter weren’t the only four-day weekend in Canada—our Thanksgiving is a three-day fete in October…when there is still a harvest to reap—I could let the occasion pass by without any big holiday expectations. Heck, I don’t eat ham either. Or any kind of meat. No one REALLY wants a vegetarian to crash their Easter dinner.
I’ve had some bad Easters. In 2014, I spent the entire occasion in a psych ward where a patient kept getting put in the lockdown room (within the already locked down ward) since he kept getting into physical fights and threatened to kill “every fuckin’ one” of us. No egg hunt on the ward. The highlight was borscht for lunch one day.
Not a good time.
In 2019, I spent all of Easter in the eating disorder ward of the same hospital. No death threats, but we had to eat every bit of three meals and three snacks along with copious amounts of water while nurses observed and took notes from a mirrored room with staged seating so they could look down on us. I have never eaten so many apples or drank so much water in my life. May I never experience waterboarding but this felt like another kind of water torture. The highlight was ten minutes of fresh air on Easter Sunday in the rooftop garden which was a sadder space than the ward itself, a smoking pit for other patients where scraggly boxwood grew alongside dandelions and fresh pigeon poop.
I am not spending this Easter in any hospital ward. That alone should feel like a celebration. Yippee! No death threats. No oversized cups of water. No plastic trays with soggy toast (or borscht).
Still, it’s been hard spending Easter alone when I have a partner who happens to live 2,300 kilometres away in Denver. In a country that’s all about God and guns, neither the Friday nor the Monday is a holiday. Airfare was higher throughout the weekend presumably because retired grandparents wanted to fly places to watch one-year-olds cry as all the adults keep telling them to keep looking for foil-wrapped eggs that will become choking hazards if not found (or eaten by Uncle Ted or vomited up by Rex the Chihuahua) by today.
Evan will fly to Vancouver this Thursday instead. He’s worked weekends to earn a little paid time off to create his own long weekend. It’s only a week later than the regular Easter celebrations. I will be thrilled to see him.
If not Easter, then may we always have the weekend thereafter. Stooping and “hiding” eggs behind the sofa legs can’t be good for my back anyway.
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