Happy Easter!

The hills are alive with...chicks and bunnies!  I do love spring, and I love Easter even more.  I’ll openly admit that I love seeing people decked out in their best pastel ensemble on Easter Sunday morning.  I’m a sucker for a smocked bunny dress and new white sandals.  My mother went to great lengths to make sure that we were dressed to the nines and color coordinating on Easter morning.  Head to toe.  Daddy’s tie matched her dress and my brother had pants that didn’t look like he was expecting a flood.  We had new shoes - most of the time too big because we had to get the summer out of them and by the end of the day, I almost always had blisters, but beauty is pain.  My mother got up at some hour closer to night than day to prepare an Easter meal - ham, scalloped potatoes, green beans, congealed salad, and pineapple upside down cake.  We hunted eggs.  Real ones.  The hard boiled ones that we had dyed the day before and then spent the rest of the day playing outside and pulled out the ham again for a sandwich for dinner because heaven knows, she wasn’t cooking again.  She made sure that we looked our best, the yard looked it’s best, and that her dinner was the best.  It always was.  This didn’t stop even as we got older and had our own kids.  As I helped clean every dish in the house after that meal, I often wondered why in the world, she didn’t just order a ham, or go out, and just enjoy the day.  But, to her, this was enjoying the day.  It was not until I was grown did I actually get it.  I began to see through the work to the look of satisfaction on her face after everyone complimented her on how delicious the Easter meal was that she had so lovingly prepared, how sweet our kids looked in the smocked outfits she bought for them, and how beautiful her flowers and Easter decorations looked on the table.  And, it was all true.  And, she did enjoy the day, she gave her best to her family.  It was a measure of her success as the matriarch of a family she poured her heart and soul into every day. 

It is no secret that I’ll never hold a candle to what my mother could accomplish in one day’s time - even when she was not well, but I carry on some of the traditions and I’ve started a few new ones.  I still decorate my table with the eggs and bunnies that decorated hers, but I chose to leave the ham cooking to Honeybaked and traded that meal in for brunch at a restaurant.  There’s plenty of them open and no dishes to clean up.  But, the one thing that remains is the tradition of celebrating the beauty of spring with family and friends.  

I’ve spent some time this weekend thinking about how these traditions came to be.  The Easter holiday gets confusing with the chicks, bunnies, eggs, large rabbits, and then the real reason - the Cross - all mixed together.  It is for me, so it has to be for kids.  I actually had to look it all up to remind myself because the correlation between a cross, an empty tomb, and a creepy large rabbit laying eggs just doesn’t make sense.  I also found myself shamefully shopping everywhere for an Elsa doll, that apparently doesn’t exist, for Easter when I realized how I too had lost the focus and standing in Wal-Mart said to myself, “this is ridiculous, Jesus died on the cross and I’m trying to find and Elsa doll.”  I love it when God kicks me.  Especially in Wal-Mart.  

I was brushing Kate’s hair for church and she asked, “mama, why do you want us to look so fancy?”  I explained to her that today we celebrate when Jesus rose from the grave and gave us the promise of heaven and we are showing respect by being at our best.  

I took the kids to put flowers on mom’s grave on Friday.  This isn’t something we had done before together - we celebrate mom’s birthday with a balloon release but it’s taken me a while to get to this point.  As I thought of all of the preparation my mom did for Easter Sunday, I just couldn’t bear her grave not looking it’s best for Easter Sunday.  So, we picked the prettiest tulips we could find - red and yellow and delivered them together.  The only real flowers in the cemetery - that much more appropriate.  She hated silk flowers - so tacky - she would say.  

As most outings are with my kids, you can never predict the direction it will go.  I had talked with both kids, but especially Kate about our plans for Friday which had already led to so many questions that were hard to answer about cancer and death - tough topics for me.  Try explaining what cancer is and how you have been healed but your mother was not to a five-year-old when you don’t understand it yourself.  She drew a picture of our family playing in the snow for Nana because she never got to play with her in the snow.  I’ve just learned to let her go where she wants to with the information, but at least she was a little prepared.  As we drove through the little road, she excitedly asked, “is that Nana’s patch, over there?”  Bailey shook his head at her and said, “she thinks it’s called a patch.”  I kind of like it - she certainly deserves her own patch.

Our family in the snow having snowball fight with Nana and G-Daddy, grass is surprisingly green.  Stephen is the bald one, Kate is the tiny one, and a pile of snowballs.

Kids don’t really hang out in cemeteries very often, or at least mine don’t.   Kate especially was fascinated with the headstones and Bailey read all of the names and asked if they were related to so-and-so.  I love how kids can take such a somber place and make it an adventure.  They raced to find mama’s and as Kate read her own namesake in print, it made me even more grateful that she too was a Martha.  There was a big double tree to climb and we looked through the blooming dogwoods to the field below - it really is beautiful.  Bailey wanted to find my grandparents so we headed to the other side and not surprisingly, I found it based on my memory of my exact view of the church from where I was standing the day my grandmother was buried 23 years ago.  I showed Bailey the “B” in my granddad’s name that was his namesake.  Kate saw a cross on a tombstone and asked if that was where Jesus was buried.  I laughed and Bailey rolled his eyes, but then realized that maybe this was her first reference point for understanding of what a grave or tomb was like.  This led to an explanation of how Jesus was buried in a tomb but He rose again on Easter Sunday which is why we will be celebrating Easter in a few days.  Bailey, my concrete thinker, asked where Jesus’s tomb was and if you could actually see it.  I explained that you could go and visit the tomb and He was buried in Jerusalem, and not Tennessee, but the tomb would be empty because Jesus rose again to give us forgiveness and the promise of heaven.  

The tomb would be empty.  

Now that’s when I realized why I was really there.  This was the most tangible discussion of what Christ did for us that I had had with my children - standing in a cemetery in Eastview, TN putting tulips on my mother’s grave so that the tradition that she started of looking your best on Easter would continue.  Never would I have thought that’s where it would go, but I know she would be proud.  She would never want us to blubber over her in a cemetery of fake flowers but would love the fact that her granddaughter skipped around asking questions and her grandson climbed trees and threw rocks to watch them travel through the dogwoods to the fields below.  And, that we talked about how her Lord gave us the peace that heaven gives us even in the presence of death by using an empty tomb.  I left out the part that it's precisely because of this promise that I could get stand there with them and have this discussion without falling to pieces, but some day they will read this and understand.

We got in the car to head home, I was exhausted from holding it together, but just said a quick thank you to God and thought to myself, “well, that went well.”  It could have gone in so many other directions.

And so, we carried on this weekend with all of the Easter traditions.  We hunted eggs in the yard - only mine are plastic because I’ll surely find a stinky rotten egg in a few weeks if I use real ones.  And we had to use flashlights because by the time I got around to hiding the eggs it was dark.  Kate and I went to the church egg hunt complete with large walking Easter bunny with an outfit that was more akin to a shag rug than a fluffy bunny.  She watched in suspicion as he creeped around, stepped over her sitting there looking at her eggs, and slid under the deck railing.  She made no attempts to have her picture taken, for sure.  And, Bailey, who decided that he was too old for the church egg hunt, still found the Easter bunny tracker on my computer and followed it all evening on Saturday, announcing that he was in New Zealand, and then England.  He and I saw a rather deflated Easter bunny at Kroger with a large head and my favorite comment yet, “Look mommy, the Easter bunny is texting.”  Let’s just say I don’t really promote the idea of large human-sized hopping rabbits.  They kind of creep me out.  I do, however, love watching children run with excitement through blooming spring flowers and green grass to find candy-filled eggs, and then eating it until they’re sick.  

And, on Easter Sunday morning, we were all bathed and clad in our best.  Bailey’s pants were 3 inches too long, for that matter, so were the sleeves on his sport coat - no sense in buying them to fit right here at the beginning of shorts weather.  He and his daddy had new bow-ties and pastel pants.  I got myself some polka dot red wedge sandals and Kate had a new dress and shoes.  She complained of blisters about 30 minutes into church and I said, “I’ll get you a band-aid after church, beauty is pain.”  But, all the girls in my class asked to take their shoes off because they had blisters too from their floppy new flats, so it was a barefoot kind of lesson.  We lined up on a pew of people in a crowded church full of people in their new Sunday best, complete with a papaw in front of us who’s Easter Sunday tradition must have included bathing in Old Spice which left us all with headaches and slight nausea.  We had brunch as a family and spent the rest of the afternoon quietly at home.  But, most of all, we celebrated all that the resurrection gives us - new life, forgiveness, heaven, and peace. 

So, today, I will pack up my chicks and bunnies and prepare for the upcoming summer months which will bring a whole other level of chaos and I try to plan a semi-entertaining schedule for 2 kids while we go to work.  I’ve determined that in keeping with my mother’s traditions of earning your keep and to keep my sanity level to a controllable level, that this will be the summer I intend to put the children to work, no more freeloading here - I’ll let you know how that goes.   

What I do know is that there is one thing that won’t ever get packed up and put away, that will remain constant through every season of life, that forever shapes our future as imperfect Christians, that gives us a reason for the empty tomb, and that promises a much better life than the one we know - the Cross. 

Happy Easter from the Jessops!

The Marthas and me.  Easter 2009 complete with smocked bunny dress bought by Martha.