The family tradition in my house is trying to figure out why we're celebrating Easter. I'd stop but I worry the neighbors might think we're Jehovah's Witness.
You just keep doing it because the kids get into it. That's how they get you; they suck you in with the kids. Easter used to be a Pagan celebration of spring and reproductivity, not that that would be any less weird with kids.
A Quick Note from Cancer
It's the sleepless month for me. A month where hope can go anywhere but mostly awry. It's hope without merit, I guess. It's hope without studying, without science and left to flake away in the corrosive winds of reality's crackling dissent. I shouldn't kid anyone. Sleepless month has spread to sleepless year, and from what I know of the human body, it's hard to make sleepless years plural.
But in April there was this idea that we--or that I--could somehow find a way to make my mom better. The medical community had failed. Maybe it was that the technology wasn't there yet, or maybe it was little bits of incompetence piling up with equal speed of crumbling odds. Things were going fast. The situation hadn't been declining in only the previous few weeks, but in a decade-long tyranny of apathy and optimism.
Optimism, I think, is a bit like luck. They're both only of value with the work necessary to ignite them. Without the work they're just concepts. Feeling good about either but actually imbued with neither. I'm not saying we were always off, and I'm most certain that my mom was always on, but we were left to believe more than could be achieved.
I know there is a lesson: do what you can when you can do it. (That could mean napping. You don't have to kill yourself. Napping is amazing and is hard to come by.) I'm talking about fortifying your luck, your positive attitude and your future night's sleep with a sunrise-to-sunset, hesitation-free, full-forced hunger for life. And that means you'll crawl to bed without anything to wake you up at night. Not even the dead.
Constantine Pitching the Christian Easter to the Romans
Constantine: Sooooo...we're not going to do the orgies this year.
Crowd: Kill him!
Constantine: Wait...wait. We've been doing Easter but it's way too Pagan. It's about sex. It's about fertility. We're Christians now. We don't do that.
Romans: Well what are we going to do on some random mobile Sunday in the Spring?
Constantine: Two words: Zombie Jesus!
(crowd murmurs...unsettled)
Constantine: And....and there will be candy!
(Crowd cheers)
Constantine: And to make it even more exciting...how about a giant bunny creeps into your house at night and hides the candy?
Crowd: ooooooh...
Wrong Constantine, but what the Hell, it's Easter.
Constantine: But here's the thing: You're the bunny. You're actually the bunny. You'll be close to nodding off on a Saturday when you're jarred awake by your wife to hide candy around the house.
Crowd: We don't get it!
Constantine: That's OK, no one really does.
Crowd cheers