A Bunny?

If you have been following this blog for any length of time you know I like to use my experiences while I was growing up and bring them forward to see how those experiences impact my life and possibly yours, today. The celebration of Easter provides a perfect opportunity to do just that.

As you might know by now, my early formative years were spent in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We had what was the model family for that time (and still should be). My Dad was the provider, working hard to make sure we had all the necessities and with enough left over for an occasional surprise. Mom was a stay at home mom. She always made sure we were ready for school in the morning, she would pack our lunches and send us out the door. She was waiting for us when we got home in the afternoon and in between taking care of the house and her family she cooked and sewed. My sister is 3 1/2 years older than me. I did just enough to let her believe she ruled over me. I’m not going into detail here because I don’t want to give anyone the wrong idea but suffice it to say, I had my means of disrupting the perceived order of things (see Eddie Haskel in Leave it to Beaver.) Finally, both sets of grandparents and my Dad’s sister had all moved to Albuquerque. I’m not sure why they all wanted to be there but back in those days it was not uncommon to have parents follow kids or kids follow parents to a new destination. In our case my dad was definitely the leader of the entire extended family and they all relied on him for many things. So that is a quick summary of the players in the Ideker family.

Holidays were always a family affair and Easter was no different. The lead up to Easter was not unlike Advent during Christmas. For Catholics everything started with the observance of Lent. For some reason I was always jealous of my Catholic buddies who would come to school after going to morning mass, sporting an ash cross drawn on the their forehead. I’m pretty sure they had no clue what it symbolized but it looked cool. Some Protestant churches also celebrated Lent, including the church we attended which was Lutheran but we didn’t do the Ash Wednesday thing. Lent generally lasted 40 days and was based on the Christ’ journey into the desert and where he fasted for 40 days. There was a prescribed schedule for what would happen beginning with Palm Sunday which marked the beginning of Holy Week. The season of Lent concluded for us on Maundy Thursday which observed the washing of the feet. We always went to church on Maundy Thursday and for me it was an almost mystical experience. The next day was Good Friday which commemorates the day Christ died on the cross. That service for an adolescent could be scary. How could anyone justify using a hammer and nails to pin a person to a wooden cross with the idea that it would torture and ultimately kill that person? I remember clearly, sitting in the choir loft of our little church, looking down at the cross draped with a strip of black fabric, feeling physically ill from the story I was hearing. Why would a group of people be so fearful of a person who could change their life and in fact the whole world, in such a positive way? You can and should try to answer that question for yourself because it will reveal a lot about what is in your own heart and how that translates into how we treat other people. That should be an Easter tradition we all follow.

My apologies, I started getting a little heavy and definitely a little preachy there and I promised you I would not do that. Mind you, I’m not letting you off the hook – you should still try to answer the question I posed. However, Easter is really a celebration and my dad liked to celebrate. Easter morning brought in the idea of a visit by the Easter Bunny and the search for hidden hard boiled eggs. The same eggs we had colored at the kitchen table the night before. Coloring eggs was always a fun mess. Mom would carefully boil a couple dozen eggs and then place them in a bowl filled with cool water. While the eggs were chilling out we would start preparing the colored concoctions the eggs would be dipped in. It was a bit of a smelly process because to dissolve the the tablets that created the various colors they were dropped in bowls of warm water and vinegar. Once that was all done the dunking and coloring could start. The egg dying kits all came with these little wires that had an open hoop on the end – they almost looked like a spoon with a hole in it. They weren’t very strong, weren’t very easy to handle and inevitably an egg or two would end up on the kitchen floor. If the shell cracked the egg couldn’t be dyed because the dye would penetrate the crack and ruin the egg inside. Thinking back on it now, that dye was probably a toxic mixture that some 80 years later would produce a tumor of some sort in mice that had been eating it for 80 years. Again, I digress. For my sister, egg dying was an art. For me it was a means to an end – identifying which eggs were mine when we hunted them the next morning. That crazy Easter Bunny was pretty smart. He would somehow know what the weather was going to be like because if it was nice most of those eggs would be outside. Mom always hated it if the weather was cold because the eggs would be hidden throughout the inside of the house and somehow, despite our best efforts, we would always miss finding one. That meant there was a ticking smell bomb hiding somewhere and the trick was to find it before that bomb went off.

The egg hunt was always followed by church which was then followed by brunch somewhere. For several years we went to an Italian restaurant named Casa Bon Apetito. As you can probably imagine, there weren’t many Italian restaurants in Albuquerque in the early 60s but this one was good and the best thing about it was the incredible Italian cookies they served after the meal. I can also remember my dad ordering Chianti wine in a straw encased bottle (he would take the bottle home, place a candle in the open neck and then use it as a table decoration – my mom hated it!) My dad never drank wine except on Easter. The Casa Bon Apetito tradition came to end when mom thought dad had enjoyed just a little too much of that Chianti. The following year we went to her mothers house for the Easter meal. Grandma Sellberg would prepare traditional Swedish Easter foods like hot cross buns, potato pancakes, potato sausage and of course that tough greasy roasted goose that no one but my dad and grandpa would eat. The thing that saved those Easter meals was the easter baskets she gave me and my sister after the meal was over. That crazy bunny had been at it again. The baskets were filled with all sorts of treats including chocolate eggs, chocolate bunnies or chicks, maybe a few malted milk eggs, and sometimes a couple of her own decorated hard boiled eggs. All the goodies were resting on a nest of fake grass stuff – again something mom didn’t care for because by the end of the night it would be all over the inside of the car and the house. And then it was over. The long wait for next Easter had started. The Easter bunny, with all his tasty treats had gone home and Easter was over – or was it?

It took me too many years for me to understand that just like Christmas, the celebration of Easter is not a once per year observance. The enormity of what Christ did for mankind on the cross cannot be reduced to a few days of observance each year. His willingness to take our sin with him, up there on the cross, give himself up to death to reconnect us with God and the reality of his resurrection three days later should be cause for celebration every day of the year, every day of our lives. Just like Christmas with good old Saint Nick, we allow the distractions of the hunt for the eggs left behind by that bunny to lead us away from the reality of the singular most important event in history. The Bible says in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Very simply my friends, that is Easter!