EASTER TRADITIONS

I’m missing my mom this Easter.  We had great traditions!   

Here are a few of them:

 

• Mom made ham in a special way, decorated with maraschino cherries and rings of pineapple.
• We always had sweet potatoes when we made a ham.
• When we were younger she would make a white cake in the shape of a rabbit’s face – covered with shredded coconut to look like “fur.”
• Before Easter day, usually on Saturday, we colored eggs with a PAAS egg-decorating kit.
• Easter morning was just like Christmas at our house – only instead of having presents under the tree, there were baskets of treats and toys hidden all over the house.
• After finding the Easter goodies, we dressed for church.  This was a big deal and preparations for just the right clothes had been going on for days.  New dress, new shiny patent leather shoes, new special white anklets, new bonnet with matching purse.
• Our church always sang pretty much the same hymns on Easter Sunday.  There was “Up From the Grave He Arose” and “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today.”
• In front of the altar there were dozens of pots of Easter Lilies.  The amazing fragrance filled the whole building.  After the service, these flowers were distributed to the shut-ins, and we always took one home to my Grandma.
• Every year without fail, after I grew up and moved away, my mom would send me a special Easter Card.
• When my own mother became elderly and I was taking care of her, I would buy her one of these special white Easter Lilies to fill her apartment with the wonderful fragrance, to remind her of Grandma, and to let her know she was special.
• I would also buy her a corsage – usually a Cymbidium Orchid – for her to wear to church on her Easter Dress.  Then I would take her to my church and show her off! 
• When my own children were growing up at home, we incorporated a lot of my childhood traditions into our family life.  We colored Easter eggs, and they each got Easter baskets.  We dressed in our most special clothes before going to church.  And we always had a special Easter dinner – usually ham fixed the way my mom had taught me.
• I added something very important with my own family, however.  We talked about the death and resurrection of Christ and what it meant.  We made worshiping the central focus of our holiday.  

Traditions are important, but it seems we only appreciate them as we get older.

Today I saw a greeting card in my mailbox, and for one tenth of one split second I thought, “There’s mom’s card.”   Kinda sad – she’s in heaven.  But no, it’s NOT sad that she’s in heaven!  She’s happy, and I am too, even though I’m missing her.

Happy Easter!

The Neighborhood

My mother-in-law said that two inventions killed the neighborhood: the automatic dryer, and air conditioning.  Perhaps you can see her point, or perhaps it needs a bit of explaining. 

Before the dryer, ladies used to hang up the clothes in the backyard.  They had long, and sometimes complicated, clotheslines.  Laundry day was a ritual that started early in the morning with sheets, towels, clothing – and even underwear(!)  put on display for the neighbors to see.   Housewives hanging up and taking down row after row of unmentionables were just a few feet away from other housewives doing the same thing.  The result – TALKING over the backyard fence!

In the evenings, everyone fled from their hot, stuffy houses as soon as dinner was over.  The adults sat on the front porch.  The kids hopped on their bicycles and rode up and down the sidewalk, where they passed other kids who were jumping rope and playing four-square.  The result – adults waving to each other as they watched their kids, and kids joining in each others’ play. 

Voilà – The Neighborhood!

Now this may be too simplistic an explanation of neighborhood shrinkage, but all I know is that I grew up in an actual Neighborhood.

Ohio evenings were much cooler than daytimes (not like Texas!), and I loved playing outside then.  I could hear the crickets chirping as darkness approached.  The doves would be going at it: “Coo – ee – coo – oo – oo.”  Sounds of skates scraping on concrete, satisfying “boink, boink” of a rubber ball, sing-song chants of friends jumping singles or “double dutch”:

“Down in the valley where the green grass grows. 

There stands Sally, as sweet as a rose. 

She sang, she sang, she sang so sweet. 

How many kisses did she get last week. 

One jump, two jump, three jump, …”

All of this freedom of play happened within the comforting (but preoccupied!) gaze of our parents, and was boundaried by: “Be home by the time the street light comes on!”

Of course, our parents—who had by this time emerged from the porches and were standing by twos and threes, talking—didn’t break off their conversations and go in the minute the street light came on.  From that moment on we were on “borrowed time.”  As long as they stood there, we were still free to do--whatever. 

As dusk descended into darkness, the street lights illuminating the neighborhood in a rather spotty fashion, my sister or I would run inside for a jar and begin chasing “lightning bugs.”  We stood very still in the darkness, watched for the brief flicker of greenish-yellow light, pointed it out, raced to where last seen, saw it blink again, reached out – and grasped the slow-moving insects carefully in one hand.  

 Slowly, gently we put the other hand on top, moved the open jar into place, shook the bug till it dropped to the glass bottom, and snapped the lid on the jar.  It was such fiendish delight to stare at the poor thing as it walked around over the glass, dazed and confused, and weakly signaling its light again and again to its companions.  No use warning them!  We were off to hunt again!

“Linda, Lorraine!  Time to come in!”

We had been noticing our Mom –with our peripheral vision -- standing under the street light, and finishing her conversation with a “Well, it’s getting dark.”

We knew there was five more minutes.

Then, suddenly she was on the porch, and the magic was over.

“Lorraine!”  “Linda!”  Come inside now!

My sister and I liked to take our nightly catch with us into the house.  We set it on the top of the dresser as we put on our PJs, then watched the jar blink and glow after Mom turned off the bedroom light.  When we were little, we thought the light display would go on forever.  As we got older with jaded “experience,” we knew that the jar would smell bad in the morning and the bugs would be dead.  We stopped keeping them.

Oh well, there’s always another hunt … tomorrow night!

The Reunion

Once upon a time our families lived closer together.  “Cousins” were not just the kids of your parent’s sibling, they were everybody in the clan that was under age eighteen.  “Aunt Mabel” might not really be your mother’s sister, but any relative about your mother’s age. 

Griffith Cousins

Yearly family reunions used to be common in families.  And it was not just about uniting the nuclear family -- grown kids who had moved a thousand miles away to start their own nuclear family.  The Reunion was a large event involving all living relatives going back about 3 generations.  This kind of Reunion was a delight for Grandma, a memory jogger for Great-grandma, a lot of work for Mom, and a dread for the kids!

Mother and her Family

Two branches of my Ohio family celebrated yearly Reunions: The Careys (Grandmother’s mother’s line) and The Griffiths (Grandmother’s father’s side), so I was doubly “blessed.”

As a child I looked forward to these things about like going to the doctor –It had to be done because my mother was making me, and “it was good for me.”

“Can’t I just stay home and read my book?”

          “We are ALL going.  There is no one here to look after you.”

“But I don’t know anybody there.”

You know Aunt Martha and Uncle Leslie and Grandma and Grandpa.

“I mean kids.  I don’t know the kids!  Who will I play with?”

There’s your cousin Zeke, and his sister Mamie.  They’re about your age.  How will you ever get to know them if you don’t go?!

“Maaaaaahhmm.  It’s so bo-ring!” (That’s mom with the vowel dragged out to emphasize my displeasure.)

“Someday you will understand.  Reunions are important.”

End of story.  I went.

Let me describe to you what it was like to join our relatives for the Reunion. 

The Old Home Place - My Great-Grandparents

For one thing, it was like going back in time.  We lived in a world of  “getting somewhere,” whether it was in our education, our jobs, our cars and houses and clothes.  Granted, our small family (my grandparents, mother, sister and I), didn’t seem to be succeeding compared to the world at large, but the aspiration was definitely there.   

My relatives, on the other hand, did the same kinds of agrarian and small-town jobs they had always done and lived on the family properties they had always lived on, and drove old farm trucks that focused on how much work they could do – not what they looked like!

Secondly, they were country folk but we were city.  It was boring at their houses on the farm because no one watched TV, and when we got there, the “entertainment” was for the cousins to take us out to look at the barn.  What was there?  Hay.  Horses in the field that we didn’t know how to ride.  Cows that we were afraid of.  My sister and I stared at things and walked around and carefully watched where we put out feet—no kind of fun that we could relate to. 

But it was great for the cousins’ entertainment.  Everyone knows that country cousins get a fiendish delight in humiliating the city cousins!

The lowest point was meeting the older relatives.  We have all had the childhood experience of being greeted enthusiastically – smiles, hugs, kisses and gushing questions – by an older person whom we never remember meeting.  THEY definitely seem to know us, but it seems to make no difference to anyone that WE don’t know them!  Uncomfortable!

The high point was the FOOD.  Our mom was a good cook, but all of these women had grown up and raised their children on a farm, and in a day when there were no frozen dinners, or even convenient packaged mixes.  Everything was made from “scratch” and every ingredient was fresh – most often coming from their own gardens out back.  I was a very tiny girl and couldn’t eat or even taste everything I wanted.  If only I could take home with me the asparagus, the fried chicken, and the strawberry-rhubarb pie!

This was the one part of country life that I envied.  I felt small in their presence, and wished that I could ever attain to such knowledge and confidence on the land and in the kitchen.

Now that I look back on those times, the real high point is the MEMORIES.  Walking around in open fields where there were no sidewalks, seeing (and smelling!) things that were foreign to me except from books, watching a dozen busy women spread food on long covered tables from living room to kitchen door, even being smothered and beloved by people I didn’t know. 

The name of this experience:  Belonging.

That’s what a Reunion is about, no matter how it is planned or packaged or experienced – it is about belonging to people other than yourself.  It is the truth that we don’t make ourselves, but we live it most at a Reunion.

Now I understand, Mom.  Reunions are important.