Seven Weeks of Easter – Week 1, Decorate!
Why is it so hard for some people to maintain a spirit of celebration? I ask this, knowing I am one such person. I find the struggles of everyday life and the penitence of the Lenten season much easier to deal with than seven weeks of Easter celebration. Who can keep up a party atmosphere that long? Christmas only last two weeks. That I can handle. Still I am usually ready for the festivities to be over and ordinary time to start. Who can keep up the Easter spirit for seven weeks? And yet that is precisely what the church asks of us each year. We spend six weeks of Lent getting ready for the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection. Then we are to spend seven weeks celebrating this important season. Many, like me, fail miserably.
That was why, this year, I’m giving myself the challenge to focus on how to keep the Easter spirit all seven weeks until Pentecost. I’m doing a series of reflections on this blog exploring ways to do this, celebrating aspects of new life, new beginnings, the challenges of rebirth, and the gifts of the spirit. It is hard not to fall back into Lenten struggles or shift ahead into the ordinary. I expect I will struggle to come up with ideas to help me keep Easter in the forefront of my mind. I invite you to struggle with me. Join me in keeping Easter this year!
Week 1 – Decorate for the Season!
As a child I loved the tradition of coloring Easter Eggs. However with four siblings, even if mom hard-boiled 2 dozen eggs, that only gave us each four or five eggs to color. And then I would take time trying to create the most amazing designs and colors, only to have my masterpieces cracked and gone in a day or two as Mom made egg salad and came up with other ways to use the eggs.
But then Mom heard about blowing out the inside of the egg, leaving the shell to be decorated. All Lent, whenever she made cookies or cake or anything else requiring eggs, she would enlist our aid to blow out the whites and yellow inside. Using a needle she poked a hole in the top and bottom, trying to break the yolk as she did to make it come out easier. We would blow until our cheeks hurt and all that was left was an empty shell. By Holy Saturday we had several dozen eggs to decorate. We took our time to make them as pretty as possible as these were going to be around for a while.
Easter Egg Tree
Mom sent us outside to get a small tree branch with lots of twigs, threaded the eggs, and we hung them on the branches, creating an Easter Egg tree. At the end of Easter, the eggs were carefully packed away until next Easter.
As our collection of Easter Eggs grew, Mom would use the extras to fill a glass basket and place it on the table as a centerpiece.
While I didn’t continue the tradition with my own children, I did have a small Easter Egg tree decorated with tiny colorful painted wooden eggs. I continue to be lax in my own decorations. It seems Easter comes and goes before I know it each year. So if this one fails, there’s other ways to decorate for the Easter season, as we shall see next week.
What Easter memory do you have? I would love to hear them!
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