happy alive again day

This is the first Easter since I’ve had children that we didn’t have family functions to shuttle between, trucking 50+ miles to pick up baskets of candy. When did Easter become the Spring Christmas, I’ve often wondered. I usually find time to attend a morning service each Easter, even in my CEO years (Christmas Easter Only). This year, we decided, we were busy enough! We were going to spend Easter on our land, in our new house, all together. We were not going to send Sassy away with Nana for the Easter Egg Hunt or with Grandpa for the morning breakfast. We would be calm, we would be together, and we would be Just Us.

So Sassy made it clear the day before that she was expecting an Easter basket from the Easter Bunny. She said something like, “I hope the Easter Bunny can find me in my new house!” Then she went on to describe the places she remembered the Easter Bunny hiding her basket in previous years. I didn’t have the heart to skip the hidden basket, so off to Kroger I went on Saturday morning.

As I was going to bed Saturday night, I was thinking (of course) that I didn’t want her to think Easter was only all about candy and a giant hiding bunny. (Though that was good fodder for jokes Saturday night, as we wondered if Sally our cat, brilliant hunter that she is, would hunt the Easter Bunny and leave him decapitated on our front stoop. Yes, we have a sometimes sick sense of humor, and yes, Sassy laughed right along with us.) And since we weren’t planning to attend Easter services anywhere, I felt somewhat responsible for her education on the subject.

I decided that Sunday morning I would take Sassy on a Easter morning walk, just the two of us with baby strapped on front. I would explain to her a more meaningful Easter that wasn’t all about candy.

So, we started with Jesus dying on the cross and coming to life again on Easter. I explained that things can die, but then come back to life. Look at the trees, I told her, see how they died over the winter and now they are coming back to life in the Spring. Look at their tiny buds (shush please, botanists, on my lack of differentiating death and dormancy on this). I explained how people in our lives have died but they have become alive again in Heaven, just like Jesus became alive again here on Earth. That’s how we know it will happen in Heaven.

Talk about simplicity! In bringing it down to a five-year-old’s level, I think I actually made Easter more meaningful for myself.

We renamed the day “Alive Again Day.” We hiked the woods and found tiny spring buds. We took pictures of some and collected others. We decided that next year, when we had an oven to bake in, we would bake a cake on Alive Again Day and celebrate all the people in our life who have died and had a second birthday in Heaven.

Here are some pictures from our walk. I hope everyone else had a very happy Alive Again Day!