Easter

I love Easter. It's not just the Christian Jesus is risen from the dead, although that is the most wonderful reason of all. That could be an entire blog post on its own. I love Easter traditions.

At church, Easter is always such a joyful service. I am one of those people who go to church every Sunday, not just on Easter, and Easter services are always special. Everybody has on bright new clothes, spring is finally here and He is risen! A truly joyful Sunday.

There are other things about Easter I love. We always color eggs and yes, it must be a Paas egg coloring kit. Nothing else will do! When my sisters and I were all little girls, we had certain rituals to go through. We always make an egg for everybody in our family, and we write their names on the egg with crayon before we color them. We used to carefully divide the stickers that came in the package, and of course, we had to be fair, so we cut them all apart and took turns choosing. The smell of vinegar and boiled eggs, an odd combination, but a memory.

We always had a big meal for lunch on Easter Sunday, usually a ham. I don't know why, but we did. We had potato salad, usually with a few of the Easter eggs in it. My mom always made a cake, and she made the best "Seven Minute Frosting" in the world. I used to watch her make it all the time but I couldn't make it if I had to. At Easter, she would sometimes color coconut green and put it on top, with jellybeans on top. It looked like grass with eggs in it. Sometimes, she would bake the cake in an angel food cake pan and then, in addition to the green coconut and the jellybeans, she would put a chocolate bunny in the hole in the middle of the cake, so it looked like the bunny was peeking out of a hole.

At one of the churches my dad used to pastor, we always had "dinner on the ground" on Easter. The men would always cook swamp cabbage, everybody brought their favorite dishes and after Sunday morning service, we ate and ate and ate. We always had fried chicken, one of the ladies always made this cake that had like 7 skinny little layers, yellow cake with chocolate frosting between every layer. I wish I had some right now. The men cooked the swamp cabbage in a big old pot over an open fire. I NEVER ate any of it. It was the nastiest looking stuff in the world.

We always got an Easter basket, no matter how old we were. We usually got new underwear and pantyhose in the basket. One of our biggest challenges to deal with after our mom died was the Easter basket. Who would fix our Easter basket? My dad, bless his heart, tried the first year. He actually had baskets in his hand, but then he got to the underwear and pantyhose part and just couldn't do it. We have figured out a way to deal with it now. My sisters and I do baskets for each other. One year, we buy for the older sister and the next year, the younger sister. We go to lunch somewhere on the Saturday before and trade. It works for us.

Another one of my favorite things about Easter is egg gravy. If you're not from the South, you probably will think this is the grossest thing ever, but we love it. Mom used to take the cracked eggs that we had colored and make egg gravy, which we would eat over toast. It's just white gravy with chopped up eggs in it, but it was always pretty, with the specks of colored eggs in it. Egg gravy and toast. . yummy. We still eat it, but only at Easter.

I also love Easter candy. I love Cadbury Mini Eggs, and Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs, jellybeans and malted milk eggs. Fabulous!

Easter. The risen Savior, the beginning of spring, family, and candy. What's not to love?