Editor’s Note:  This is being published the Saturday before Holy Week starts.  It is the author’s weird thoughts about some of the secular things that have attached themselves to Easter.  I insisted that this not be published during Holy Week, in that Holy Week should be kept … Holy.

He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay.

• Matthew 28:6

The only Scripture above is the biggest thing to remember on Easter.  He is risen!  He is risen indeed!

But that is next Sunday.  Tomorrow, as of this being published, is Palm Sunday.

I will not “joke” about Holy Week, but the secular trappings around Easter are all fair game.

About 10-15 years ago, I was walking through the discount department store and I found myself in the greeting card aisle.  I saw an Easter card.  Excuse me, I saw a card purported to be an Easter card. My wife, at the time, made all our greeting cards.  She had an artistic flair, and it came from the heart.  But even she would go to the greeting card aisle to pick up new ideas.  This card was practically a small book, over a half dozen folds.  The cover and all the folds until the last had nothing but grass that needed to be cut.  As I turned the last fold open, I saw a couple of Easter eggs, half hidden in the tall grass, an Easter Bunny, and the only words printed on the card, other than the manufacturing stamp, “Welcome to Spring, the only Meaning of Easter.”

I put the card back.  I was offended.  These people may sell millions of cards each year, but from that day on, they got none of my business.

Sure, the word “Easter” comes from a Germanic word for a pagan holiday that was observed about the same time.  And that holiday had nothing to do with Christianity and everything to do with Spring arriving.  And some people argue about two or three possible origins of the word (not the holiday or when it is).  But the choice of the day on the calendar is strictly determined to coordinate with Jewish Passover.  Because the Jewish calendar does not coincide with the Julian Calendar, Easter bounces around, and on some years, it is no where near that Germanic pagan holiday.  But we have been stuck with the name Easter for a long time now.

And thinking of Easter Yeggs, one of my fictional characters, he and Jemima are doing quite well, mostly making straight A grades.  Easter has looked on the calendar, and his birthday, coming up in a couple of weeks, was Easter about ten years before he was born, twenty years before, and thirty years before, but it will not be Easter again until he nears retirement age, 2066.  It’s that leap year thing combined with the differences in the Julian and Jewish calendars.  But that does not stop Easter (Turtle Team codename: Easy) from having been born on Easter and his mother saddling him with the name Easter Yeggs.  Naomi hated that her husband was Deviled Yeggs, and she wanted to put a stop to it, but that morning, she just could not resist temptation.

Thinking of temptation, the photo above is of a nest that was knocked from the rafters of my back porch.  We have had robins nesting in the rafters for years.  Within a short while, I expect the back porch to get noisy and busy.  I worry about the fallen nest though.  Did storm winds knock it down or naughty birds of a different color?

But since this is Easter season and I recently had a small bag of “Robin Eggs”…

Editor’s Note: Before we go any farther, this is in the category of “DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!!!!”

Okay, back to the bag of Robin’s Eggs.  These “eggs” are candy coated malted milk balls in the shape of an egg.  And some are the right size to be “Robin’s Eggs.”  My question is, if you add a couple of these candies to a real robin’s nest, Will the robin quickly figure it out or will you frustrate the robin to no end because the stupid malted milk ball simply refuses to hatch?

I will not try that.  I respect the robins too much, but it was a thought that crossed my mind.

I was checking out of the grocery store recently and I had a small bag of “mini eggs.”  The checkout lady said those were her favorite and I agreed, mine too.  But they come in four colors: white, yellow, pink, and blue.  I have often wondered.  If I eat a yellow one and a blue one at the same time, have I eaten the equivalent of a green one?  They are two good to spit out just to check.

I look at all the craziness with Easter Egg hunts and Easter baskets and such, and I think of my youth.  In my hometown, Easter was a religious holiday, an important one.  My grandmother on my mother’s side was impish.  She slipped me a chocolate bunny one year – a big one.  I have had a couple since then, after becoming an adult.  I got an Easter basket one year.  It was the same year that the school had someone sponsoring an Easter Egg hunt, my only time doing that until I was a teenager, and then it was my job to find the eggs my nephew and niece missed so that I did not “find” them with the lawnmower.  But back when I was little and my only Easter egg hunt, we had to have an official basket with plastic grass to participate in an Easter Egg hunt at the elementary school.  We had to wear our Sunday best clothing.  The local newspaper was taking photos of this historic event.  A girl in one of the other classes found the golden egg worth $100, a lot in those days, but everyone got a few jellybeans.  A few got rotten eggs.  This was years before the idea of a plastic egg with something hidden inside.

Otherwise, Easter morning was a sunrise service, sometimes a church breakfast, and then Sunday school, then another worship service, and then a nap since we woke up so early.

HAPPY AND MEANINGFUL HOLY WEEK

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.