Marking Time
Easter candies are on the shelves, as they have been since February. Other Easter products, like baskets and bunny ears, appeared more recently, but, judging by their share of the shelf space, nobody shows much interest in them. Despite the egg dying kits, Easter remains a church holiday, unlike Christmas. Still, everyone I know, including atheists, Unitarians, and Jews, still marks Easter with a candy egg, or even a marshmallow peep.
Because even when it isn’t our holiday, we like to mark passing holidays for the sheer pleasure of the ritual itself. At least I do, and I doubt I’m alone. This was the first year that Eileene and I missed St. Patrick’s Day, because we were busy showing my parents around New York area restaurants. Neither of us is Irish. We still had a corned beef brisket the following Monday, though it wasn’t the same.
Eileene and I don’t celebrate everyone’s holiday, of course, for a few reasons. For one thing, there’s only so much time in the year, and holidays overlap. We’re also ignorant of many holidays. I know of Yom Kippur, for example, but I don’t know about it: what one traditionally wears, eats, and so on. Still, there’s no reason in principle why we shouldn’t enjoy it as we do Chinese New Year, in a thoroughly secular and americanized fashion, and with an eye to the food.
But the real reason, of course, is that we didn’t celebrate those other holidays as kids. We like doing the ones we grew up with, precisely because they’re the ones we grew up with. It keeps us in touch, however distantly, with childhood and family.