During the lesser-known Holy Week ritual of planning for Easter eggs and Easter baskets, my husband showed off his purchases of chocolate bunnies and fruit punch-flavored Peeps. He cringed when I said, “We still need Easter grass.” Because to me, Easter grass is a necessary part of the whole Easter basket thing. To him, it’s something akin to glitter or Christmas tree needles: a substance that once admitted to your house will never actually be gone. It will outlast the Peeps and the chocolate bunnies, and even the 50 days of the Easter season. You’ll think it’s gone, and then you’ll move a cushion, or fish a shoe out from under the couch, and a thin strip of pastel paper or plastic will appear. I think we’re both right, so I suggested that we look for paper Easter grass, which is at least recyclable and doesn’t cling to things quite so persistently as the plastic kind. Maybe the only thing more persistent than Easter grass is our insistence on using it. There’s no real reason for us to make Easter baskets anymore. Two of our kids are young adults and the third is a teenager. It’s been a decade or so since anyone believed in the Easter bunny, or Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, for that matter. But every year we dye eggs, and on Holy Saturday evening, we set them out in the Easter baskets. Late that night, we hide them and fill the baskets with candy and small gifts, right before heading up to bed, bringing the dog with us. In the morning, our youngest makes quick work of finding them. Probably because we tend to use most of the same hiding places from year to year. But we’ve never seriously thought about not doing baskets, or Christmas stockings, or carving jack-o’-lanterns at Halloween. It’s just what we do, marking the holidays and changing of the seasons. Most years we have the same kinds of conversations, too, conversations that our kids don’t need anymore, about how we use eggs as a sign of new life at Easter, and how we give gifts at Christmas because of the gift God gave the world. It’s not always exactly the same. Some years, not everyone is home, and some years, we’ve celebrated on vacation. I know St. Paul wrote about putting away “childish things” in his first Letter to the Corinthians, but I think we’ll keep this up in some form for at least another few years. Maybe until our youngest is out of high school. Maybe then we’ll adapt our family customs, but I don’t think we’ll abandon them entirely. Because much like Easter, things worth celebrating are worth celebrating again and again.
About the Author Michelle Martin is staff writer at Chicago Catholic. Contact her at [email protected].