Chocolate Jesus

I've never celebrated Easter with Ella.

We do Christmas only because it simply can't be avoided but there's really no mention of Jesus. She knows the stories of Jesus, she thinks he's a pretty cool prophet, but that's pretty much where the stories end. She knows that Christianity and Paganism are two different religions and that, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, the church began a mission to try and erase the earth religion of the hillspeople and villagers by kind of super-imposing their holidays on top of the Pagan holidays. I mean, how else does the rising of Christ meet up with the rabbit and the egg? Or the evergreen tree and strings of light intercept the birth of him? Somewhere along the line all the symbols just kind of merged together into this weird little medium and everyone stopped asking questions.

But we've never done the Easter thing. We've decorated eggs on the Equinox for years and have celebrated the fact that our days would now be getting longer than the nights but Easter has always come and gone.

This time of year, we're almost always tapping trees and boiling sap into sugar. Three years ago, a friend of hers came over to help and be a part of the experience. She came with her brand new pale pink Easter basket and whatever cool stuffed toy came inside of it. Ella looked like the kid left out of the newest club. Why didn't the Easter bunny bring her anything?

The two years that followed she spent in Pennsylvania with my parents. She went to church with my grandma and spent most of the hour with her jaw hanging in her lap (or just drooling from plain boredom). She received the basket and the chocolate egg and the Barbie or stuffed rabbit or whatever else was lavishly bestowed upon her that day. The Easter Bunny came alive in Pennsylvania. Grandparents are always good for that.

This is the kid who caught me in the act of writing the note from the tooth fairy and still believes anyway. I was just getting in the way of magic, as far as she's concerned... so it's really no big feat for her to take on a whole new fantasy creature to believe in. So, yesterday, as I'm leaving for work, she looks up dreamily and asks " I wonder what the Easter Bunny will bring me tomorrow?"

I automatically start mapping my route to work. First to Big Lots for a basket and some of that weird grass shit, then to the chocolate store for a bunny and little chocolate eggs and jellybeans. Am I really doing this? But yes, I am. And honestly, I enjoyed it.

I found a beautiful green woven basket for $2.50 and the grass was yellow and made of paper, not plastic.... very pretty. I work right next door to an amazing chocolate store and so I loaded up on foil wrapped dark chocolate eggs and "gourmet jellybeans" (what the hell are "gourmet jellybeans, really?). I bought organic, orange spice chocolate squares and "Non Parallels" ~ toasted hemp seeds atop drops of organic belgian chocolate. Pretty groovy Easter basket if I do say so myself.

I felt like I should buy her a present for Easter. I knew she'd be expecting one after two years with her grandparents but I just couldn't bring myself to buy some over packaged Made In China Barbie or some crazy thing like that. I opted for some prettily painted flower pots and six packages of flower seeds. It's a spring holiday, right? If we lived further south, we'd be enjoying crocuses and daffodils instead of a full day of snow!

So, we've spent the better part of our day gorging ourselves on dark chocolate and lying around on the couch. Oh, and we did make eggs.... last night. They were quite lovely. We blew six and boiled six. Dyed them all. If we could find the ground out there, we'd go searching for a pretty stick to make a mobile out of the hollow eggs but that will just have to wait. In the meantime, it'll be egg salad sandwhiches and chocolate in the lunchbox all week.

She left a note on the kitchen table with a bowl of chopped up carrots. It read:

your the best.

Love Ella

gust

for

you.

can you

sine your name writ here

name_________________

And when her friend called this morning she said, "Yeah! He came! And now I know his real name. It's Mr. E Bunny!"

And there is one advantage to having snow on Easter. She was able to see his tracks outside the window making a path all the way to the neighbors house.