Easter Rant

This is not my most eloquent post ever.  In fact, it's probably one of my most jumbled and ranty.  But I had to get it out.

Maybe it's just me, but Easter has always been my least favorite holiday.

Okay, let me clarify: not Easter as in the Christ-believing population day of celebrating the Resurrection.  Obviously that's not my least favorite.  That's Most Favorite.  (Second Favorite is free cone day at Ben & Jerry's, maybe?)

No, it's the commercial part of Easter that I hate.  It, like most commercial holidays at least here in the USA, well they just don't make make no dang sense.  Tell me WHAT do dyed eggs and chocolate bunnies have to do with ANYTHING.  And all the pastels.  Which I understand are the accepted colors of spring, but the overloading of pastel colors at Easter instilled a loathing in me of pastels that I am only just rehabilitating myself from.

That, and uncomfortable dresses.  I do not understand why we celebrate Easter like we do.  Why, as kids, were we forced to wear the stupid, itchy, stiff "Easter outfits" to run around in the hot, sweaty grass in at the egg hunts?  WHY???  It's so aggravating to me!  It doesn't make any sense!  All my memories of the Easter holiday are needlessly negative; they're all posing for pictures while stuffed into a starchy dress and tights and shoes that hurt and curled hair, and then being driven to a field somewhere and made to run through the grass in that same outfit with a bunch of kids I don't know, competing for some reason to find a lot of eggs.  Eggs.  I just don't get it.  And, as every non-competitive person knows, being forced to compete when you're missing that gene is something short of torture.  Especially cause there are always really competitive kids who NEED ALL THE EGGS AND HAHAHA YOU'RE STUPID CAUSE I GOT THIS EGG FIRST.

And then, somewhere in the midst or the afterburn of all of that, we're told we need to think about Jesus, and I always ended up feeling disinterested or guilty because I was secretly in a bad mood from the dress and the egg hunt that I didn't want to think about Jesus and I didn't really understand why I was supposed to anyway.  Cause I was a kid.  To kids, "resurrection" is just a big word we hear in church a lot.

Of course, now that I'm older and understand things as an adult, I appreciate Jesus' resurrection as the most sacred thing ever, and I understand Easter as a special holiday.  But now there are two Easters, and the egg hunt one I think I could just abandon entirely and feel so much better about life.

When James is old enough to participate in holidays and Easter rolls around, I'm just going to let him go naked all day long.  And we'll have a perfectly relaxed and happy day, and eat all the candy because we all know I would never turn down a perfect excuse to eat a lot of candy, and we'll talk about Jesus as is appropriate to his understanding, and with hope he won't be needlessly aggravated like his poor mama.

There.  I feel better now.