Holidays and Families

04.01.2010

Happy April Fool’s Day!

This week is Easter week and I’ve been thinking a lot about how the holidays were when I was growing up. Twice a year, for Christmas and Easter, I’d get a new holiday outfit – usually a dress that my mom picked out – to wear to church. My grandmother would always fly out for the Easter holidays (and we’d go to Chicago for Christmas) and there’d be all this food preparation depending on the holiday and for Easter our traditional Lithuanian egg dying. I would always give something up for Lent, usually chocolate, and then Easter morning gorge myself giving myself a stomach ache before mass. All these little routine family traditions are something I really miss…kind of like I was talking about yesterday.

I understand that having kids could relieve some of this. With a bambino in the house there’s suddenly a need to do the Easter egg hunts, and baskets, and Easter bunny stories, family get-togethers, etc. But I sometimes wonder if there’s isn’t this weird transformation that happens in that whatever emptiness we may feel or whatever sadness we may feel, and we substitute it or sugar-coat it with having kids. Kids let us relive our childhood memories creating a kind of deja-vu that, perhaps, provides an odd sense of contentment.