Easter

This year we’re celebrating Easter twice. The Easter of the West has just finished. The Easter of the East is coming up next Sunday.

For some it’s lucky to celebrate twice. More laughter, more traditions to enjoy and understand. More myths linked to the festival.

There are families who celebrate two Christmases. There are families who celebrate Hanukkah and Christmas, or Eid Mubarak and something else. For some this is a gift. For others this is incomprehensible and unsettling.

We somehow took for granted the fact that everyone should enjoy diversity. For many years now we believed that everyone’s beliefs and comfort are OK to be challenged on a daily basis. But not many people like things to be different, actually. John does not really feel comfortable when his neighbour celebrates Christmas while John is stripping his Christmas tree and taking it out for the bin men to collect on Epiphany. At the same time Amélie across the road puts a Galette des Rois on the table with a favour inside and smell of marzipan in the air. John/Mary (or both) wonder(s) whether these people’s out-of-synch holidays might grow in importance in his tolerant country of cultural diversity and thus disrupt the hum-drum of his everyday life and his habitual holidays.

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At Easter in the West people eat chocolate eggs. In the East people eat hard-boiled, dyed eggs. They have a competition knocking each other’s egg to see which egg is the strongest and doesn’t break. The people in the West look suspiciously on the multicoloured eggs from the East: can you eat that?

I’m celebrating two Easters. Yesterday I ate chocolate and next Sunday I’ll be offering hard-boiled multicoloured eggs to my family to compete and find out who will be the strongest for the year to come. This is our tradition. We all felt uneasy at the beginning. We all stuck to our guns to start with. Now our customs and habits are unimaginable with just one chocolate Easter.

We like it that way.

Oh, and we ate “la Galette des Rois” at Epiphany, drugged by the wafts of marzipan dough. I was crowned Queen twice, but gave away my favours to two disappointed children. In the name of generosity, tolerance and love. Stay strong in your tradition, wherever you come from.