Respecting traditions

Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate the holiday. The cats and I do not observe it at the Jolly Bungalow. Our holiday is the Spring Equinox, called Alban Eilir in the druidic tradition. It is the time of sowing seeds, real or metaphorical, and celebrating the wonderful re-growth in nature that occurs each spring. I had a lovely holiday, thanks.

I have explored the motifs of Easter before and seen the overlap with mine. I’ve also tasted some traditional Passover foods and read about the Seder. I like to understand what others do and believe. 

This year I created an Easter basket of sorts. Hmm, eggs and chicks. Might that be something left over from the old ways of celebrating the seasons?

In an artisan-made pottery basket, lined with grass made from tow linen,  I arranged a felt chick and two free range hen eggs from a farm stand. The light does not capture their natural pale blue color. Isn’t that prettier than all that plastic decor you see in the supermarket? It may not have been what you were given as a child, but you know the harm of plastic now.

This year I have not felt the weight of everybody celebrating something that I do not. Why do I think of it as a weight? I guess it’s because I often want to do ordinary things that are closed on some holidays. This year, we are all just staying home (I hope). It’s the same day for us all.

I try to treat the day with a little bit of respect for those who celebrate it. I would not mow the lawn or engage in something that was bothersome when others are sitting down to a holiday meal. Interestingly enough, I have a neighbor who seems to make a deliberate fuss on other peoples’ holidays. Right now he is running the leaf blower, and I can remember last year at one of the holidays he decided to burn brush around the time everybody would’ve been sitting down to their holiday meals. 

That’s not what I do—even when things like this happen on my holidays. I accept the fact that people don’t get my holidays as a day off from work and they go through the day pretty oblivious to the fact that it is anyone’s holiday. 

There is a part of me that wishes my holidays were a little more known. Wouldn’t it be nice to be wished a happy harvest at the autumn equinox and to see featured displays of cheese in late winter,  and fancy breads and craft beers featured at the grain harvest?

Maybe if we tried doing some of the traditional things people do for their holidays (interpreting them though our own lens, of course), we could find common ground. I don’t expect anyone to believe in all that is behind another’s holiday, but to sample it and think about what it means to those who believe in it. So happy Easter, and may you find a sense renewal in your beliefs as I do in mine.