Easter has probably changed the most for us as our family has grown up and grown. When I was little, Easter was exciting for all sorts of reasons; we always got new clothes, our baskets were filled with Fanny Farmer candy and after the cut throat competition of the egg hunt and mass, we went to The Club for brunch.
Let’s take these items one at a time.
First, the new clothes. There were a lot of us so new clothes were not something we took for granted. Most of us never saw an unused item of clothing in our wardrobes at any time but Easter. Like all our friends, we dressed almost exclusively from the Sears catalogue. Like most of our friends, we dressed in second or third hand items from the Sears catalogue. Like a few of my friends, I had a Mom who sewed, so at least while I was still very young, my Easter outfits were original. I remember the year Mom made matching light blue linen dresses for me, my sister Margy, who was a toddler and herself. They were very stylish, A-line dresses with short sleeves and decorative pleats at the yolk. The only differences in the three dresses were the tiny floral appliques she added to the top of the pleats. Margy’s were white daisies, mine were pink roses and I don’t remember what Mom’s were but if I had to bet, I’d go with something blue like irises. I was four or five and I knew we looked hot. The year before or after, I had a blue and white sailor dress with matching spring weight coat. Man, I was a stylish kid! In first grade I had a hot pink corduroy pant suit with gold buttons and a pair of black patent leather go-go boots. I also remember a navy blue corduroy mini skirted jumper with a red patent leather belt. I wore it with a red turtleneck and a newsboy cap in matching navy blue corduroy. It was 1966 and Twiggy didn’t have shit on me. Well, except for her bitchin’ eye makeup, which I would have killed for but I was six: I probably thought she was born looking like that.
Then my Mom had seven more kids and didn’t have time to dress me up like a Dolly Darling anymore. From then on, I dressed like what I was: a dirty little slob dependent on my brothers’ hand me downs. It’s a look I proudly carry with me to this day.
Some of our favorite family photos are the ones from those fancy pants Easters. And by ‘fancy pants’ I mean striped denim in shades of red and blue. Worn by Billy and Andy with blue fringed vests. They looked like Osmond brothers. Well, not Andy, he was too cherubically blond. I think I wore green plaid palazzo pants that year.
But the clothes were nothing compared to the importance of the candy in our Easter baskets. We were always a hard charging bunch when it came to sweets. I blame my mom, who baked the greatest cookies the world had ever eaten every day of our lives. Seriously, she baked cookies every day and we ate as many as we could, which was all of them, every day. Back then, kids could do that kind of thing because we spent exactly no minutes a day sitting around, staring at screens. Once school was over, we were out in the neighborhood, running, jumping, climbing, sliding, biking, skating, fighting etc. until it was time for dinner. A loser was anyone with skin on their knees. Growing up, I knew exactly 3 fat kids and they were noticeable for being pudgy. Most of us looked like extras from The Grapes of Wrath; skinny, dirty and obviously wearing hand me down rags. God, life was good! I remember one summer when my brother Joe and I tried to see how long we could survive on nothing but mulberries, crabapples and rhubarb out of our neighbors back yards. Answer: until the first batch of Mom’s chocolate chip cookies came out of the oven.
Not only would most city kids these days be horrified by the idea of living off their neighbors decorative plantings, their parents would probably lose custody if they even tried. It’s tragic, really.
But Lent was a season of fasting and abstaining from all that cookie eating and in Minnesota, it was too early in the year for our neighbors’ delicious hedges to provide any relief from the boring macaroni and cheese we had to eat for six weeks. Denying ourselves was worth it because we knew at the end of it all, we’d be rewarded with our own big Easter basket packed with all the traditional Easter candy: jelly beans, peeps (I always traded my peeps away for chocolate) cream eggs and the King of All Candy: a 6 oz solid milk chocolate bunny from Fanny Farmer.
I’ve tried Dove, Godiva, Hershey’s, Choceur, Russel Stover…every brand out there but nothing can touch the deliciousness of Fanny Farmer. Easter baskets will never be the same. I mean, without a Fanny Farmer bunny, I don’t even care anymore.
Oh, that’s not true: I still want a chocolate bunny after Lent. But it’s not the same and not just because the bunnies are smaller than they used to be too: down from 6oz to 4oz.
I enjoy Lent far more as an adult than I ever did as a kid but even back then, the forty days of hardship were a great lead up to the fun of Easter. Good Friday is anti-fun. Not only do we give up meat which isn’t that hard, I hear some people do it on purpose, all the time but it’s also a day of fasting, which means no food between meals. Not just from sun up to sun down, but from Midnight to Midnight. That’s a lot harder for us fat, indulgent Americans than just giving up meat. I for one, find fish completely delicious. Done properly, fasting also means two very small meals and one average sized dinner. We’re not talking a full eggs, cereal and muffin breakfast followed by tomato soup, grilled cheese, chips and cookies for lunch with a salmon, salad, bread and veggie dinner. We’re talking one bowl of cereal for breakfast, a sandwich with no sides for lunch and soup and salad for dinner. Maybe a cookie for dessert but not a good cookie, since I give up chocolate for Lent.
Okay, I did just get a killer recipe for almond cookies from Margy but you can only have one right after dinner, no stack of cookies at 9:00 while watching Game of Thrones.
But then comes Holy Saturday and by noon it’s all over! As kids, we spent the afternoon of Holy Saturday dying several dozen eggs and trying to outdo each other with our ingenious methods of color application and design. Because competition makes everything more fun!
Late at night, Mom would hide not only the dozens of eggs we’d colored but all our baskets as well, so Easter morning began with a family wide egg hunt during which we’d each discover a big, colorful basket full of candy with our name on it. some of us would bow out of the egg hunt as soon as we’d found our baskets because the lure of hard boiled eggs just isn’t as big a pull as a basket full of Fanny Farmer candy. Plus, Billy or JP would already have found half the eggs by then so there was no chance of winning. It just wasn’t Easter until Andy was in tears. Good times.
Of course, by the time my younger siblings were old enough to compete in the egg hunt, we older kids were too cool to hunt for eggs, so we pitched in and helped hide them instead. That’s when we discovered that hiding the eggs could be as competitive as hunting them. Mom had to do a careful count of the eggs to make sure they were all found. She made us each clear the eggs we’d hidden at the end of the hunt if the count didn’t tally up. Even with all these precautions, there were a few eggs discovered late in the summer one or two years. Those we disposed of with the careful concern of a bomb squad. No one wanted to be responsible for turning our only TV room into a toxic waste land for the foreseeable future.
As soon as the eggs were found, whoever found the most eggs would get his or her (it was alwaysJP or Billy) picture taken with a giant bowl of colored eggs then we’d all don our new Easter Finery for Mass and the highlight of the year: Easter Brunch.
Jesus died horribly on the cross and gloriously rose to life, vanquishing death itself to demonstrate God’s great love for us all and blast open the Pearly Gates but if there’s not a brunch spread like the one MGC used to put on for Easter Sunday, I for one will be a little disappointed in Heaven.
First of all, is there anything better than breakfast food? No, there is not. Because all food can be breakfast food and it was all there on display at the enormous, all you can eat buffet at the club. There were tables filled with steaming pans of bacon, sausage, ham, prime rib, potatoes, eggs done two or three different ways, tables piled with every kind of cheese, fruit, bread and toast, stations for putting together your own omelet, your own Belgian waffle, pancakes, three different kinds of syrup, mountains of fresh cut fruit, chocolate, caramel and cherry sauces, bowls of nuts, tossed salads, asparagus, green beans, I remember piles of those little single serve boxes of cereal with pitchers of whole milk, ice tea, coffee, orange juice, tomato juice, lemonade, ice water, tea, and you had to be careful not to stuff yourself because when you were done with all that there was a separate table filled with desserts.
Basically it was an entire bakery at your disposal. Every kind of muffin imaginable, scones, pop overs, donuts, cinnamon rolls, coffee cakes, pies, layer cake…and it was all you can eat. And if the weather permitted, there was an egg hunt for the little kids out on the lawn by the putting green. If it was still snowy, the egg hunt was upstairs in the ladies lounge.
It may have been the highlight of our entire year growing up.
But all things pass and so did Easter Brunch.
I was able to bring Tyler and Katie a few times when they were tiny but by the time Zack was born, we weren’t doing it anymore. First it became too expensive for us all to manage and then it became too costly for the club to even put on and finally for health department and insurance reasons they dispensed with the buffet entirely.
The last time we did Easter Brunch was 15 or 20 years ago. My parents were still down in Florida that year and I called and asked if it would be okay for those of us still in town, who wanted to go to the club to use their membership. They said yes, I spread the word and in the end, something like 22 of us met for brunch that Easter. We took a photo of the long, long table of kids and grandkids and sent it to Mom and Dad.
Nowadays, we meet for brunch at Mom’s house for a pot luck, all you can eat brunch that is almost as good as the old days. It’s really hard to do eggs benedict for 40. I do miss the Belgian waffles, though.
When my kids were growing up, I tried to keep as many of these traditions going as I could. New clothes, dying eggs, an egg hunt, hiding baskets, mass and then tons of family fun. We did it all when they were little!
I had to tweak a few things. Early on, Jay told us all that if the Easter bunny brought one more strand of fake grass into his house, he was going to skin him and use him for fish bait. So, I had to come up with a suitable substitute. I tried a few different things and settled on brightly colored T-shirts from Michaels as a basket base in which to hide the candy. That worked and the kids seemed to like it although they never ever wore the T-shirts. I did. I couldn’t resist them; they weren’t hand me downs.
Dying eggs died out around here as the kids got too old and busy to help. They all seemed to think I was going to spend an afternoon hard boiling and dying eggs by myself even though they had no interest in getting up early enough before mass to hunt them down. By the time Josie was in high school, we’d gotten rid of all our plastic eggs and only dyed one dozen. It’s been years now since I’ve dyed an egg.
My Mom doesn’t dye eggs anymore, either. That’s the kid’s job to do with their own kids now. I can easily see a day when I’ll go help the grand kids dye eggs but this year, as I said, I was too wiped out to even think about it.
And anyway, we’ve added a new dimension of tradition for our family: Lent is inextricably wound up with March Madness, brackets and the Final Four. It’s all good, it’s all fun and our unwritten rule is you don’t get to ask God to help your bracket. God doesn’t take sides, even if Catholic schools do seem to win an inordinate amount of the time. Jay always tries to be home for Easter but he’s missed one or two over the years because of the tournament. This year he was gone most of Holy Week. He returned late in the morning on Sunday, hit the noon Mass downtown and met us at my folks, where all the in-town siblings, grandkids and great grandkids met for Easter Brunch. it was great!
Packed full of breakfast, I could easily have crashed and spent the entire afternoon napping on the couch, covered with my own grandkids but we had to roll on down the road to where the Pivec clan was having Easter Dinner.
During the five minute drive from one party to the next, Zack and Josie talked about how cool it was that we had not only one but twofamilies that we actually love hanging out with. If only everyone were as lucky as we are, the world would be a much happier place.
Side note: the grandkids did have new Easter Finery but Xena and Babalouie changed out of their hyper fancy duds after church. BoopityBoop were wearing the lovely dresses Katie and I bought for them a week or two ago. We found equally gorgeous dresses in similar shades of peach for them so they looked good together without matching. Then Katie bought jean jackets for them: one in white and one in blue denim. Those little girls were stylin’!
As if all that weren’t enough, when we got home later on, we all watched the live version of Jesus Christ Superstar on TV.
It was a perfect Easter Sunday.