Holidays bring up stuff

The bonus of the extra downtime that accompanies holidays or ‘hols’ is often given over to contemplation. Waves of nostalgia arrive for the Easters of one’s youth, the sad services of Good Friday (with a choir member fainting on more than one occasion—an unfortunate who forgot breakfast or a snack before the 3 hour vigil) and then the jubilant hymns of rejoicing on Easter Sunday (prefaced by Jone’s sausage (a special treat), scrambled eggs and baking powder bisquits). A little Easter basket, woven out of paper appeared at some point in the day with a miniature fluffy chicken presiding over jellybeans. (Certainly Ronald Regan’s finest attribute was his appreciation and reverence for the humble jelly bean.) And, oh yes, the Easter eggs decorated with waxy crayons and dipped in the many hues of vinegary spring.

These days in Waikikamukau still nourish bouts of cultural cognitive dissonance in this instance: Easter in North America happily conflates rising from the dead from the sepulchure near Golgotha and the return of flowers and plants in the family plot, garden and lawn. You are seeing your first robin--we await the first frost. Our clocks going back for daylight saving instead of ‘springing ahead’.

Then there is this…

“Here comes Peter Cotton tail,
Hopping down the Bunny Trail,
Hippity, hoppity, Easter’s on its…”
BLAM

Your Easter bunny brings treats while the NZ bunny has only Easter bunny hunt to look forward to. This year 39 teams entered for the 24 hour hunt and the carcass count on Saturday revealed a record number of rabbits shot per team. The weekend tally included 1152 hares, 54 possums, and 54 stoats [if that’s a typo, it’s not mine] for an overall tally of 24,378. [Perhaps it should be called a varmint hunt to make the moniker more ‘inclusive’. (Wim just informed me that he saw a rat strolling by while he was playing with his XBox—the Easter rat?)]

More stuff: The intensity of many hours spent last week preparing, rehearsing and taking part in a performance of Bach’s Passion According to St. John added to our nostalgia and awareness of the season. It has been years since we inhabited a town or city where all commerce ceased for Good Friday and Easter. [April 4th, Easter, was my father’s birthday too. He was born on a Psalm Sunday!]

None of this constitutes or has created a moment of personal ‘epiphany’ “when the present moment reaches out into the past and the future”. A blog entry pondered but not pounded into purposeful prose was planned back in January to sum up the year and the decade from my perspective as someone leaving the past decade behind and moving country. A moment of heightened awareness did produce the following observation: when your mood is dark, you are apt to miss your ‘home’, your friends, relatives and everything! You do not feel at home in your new country—you are an immigrant. When you are feeling upbeat and secure, you can step back and feel happy to be dwelling in a very beautiful world filled with stimulating variety and wonderful people here and in your previous home. You are a ‘Permanent Resident’.

[Postscript: If the’rat’ was indeed a mouse, he/she would be the rodent that succumbed during the night in our handy-dandy mouse trap. The last supper in this case consisted of gourmet peanut butter or a quick whiff thereof...]