CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Easter is Not a Well Thought-Out Holiday

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

this entry brought to you by the white stripes, "as ugly as i seem"

this past easter sunday i tried really hard to come up with an idea to write about on easter, but as you can see, i came up empty handed and instead wrote something about fat people that had been sitting in my notebook a couple days. here is my actual easter entry, belated as it may be.


Easter is a nice enough holiday. People say Christmas is really for the kids, but I think that is bullshit. Kids are extremely easy to please, and unlike adults will tell you exactly what they want. In fact, getting them to stop telling you what they want is kind of tricky. There's never a shortage of ideas for what to get your kid, even if the thing they want most is out of your price range, it's not like they won't accept all the other cheap crap you got them. And hell, if you honestly have no idea what to get your kid, you could always make something up. I mean, nobody asks for an Etch-A-Sketch, but once you get one, they're really cool. For a couple days, anyway.

Adults, on the other hand, like to be difficult and are as unspecific as they can be when you ask them what they want. So the bulk of your thoughts on Christmas time isn't dedicated to your kids, it's dedicated to your asshole grown-up family, who never like what you get them, but never tell you what they would've liked in the first place.

Easter, on the other hand, is for the kids. You go out and buy the egg dying kit, the plastic green shredded shit that looks about as much like grass as tensile looks like icicles, the stuffed bunnies-- all the stuff that kids get a kick out of but has an extremely limited appeal. See, Christmas gets better as you get older. And hell, even Halloween only loses its appeal when none of your asshole friends wants to dress up. But Easter is the one holiday that goes from fun to uninteresting to mind-numbingly boring in the span of just a few years. There's only so many places you can hide eggs in the front yard. Public easter egg hunts thrown by your local church or school are great at first when the eggs are plentiful, but 20 minutes in when 75% have been found and eggs become more and more scarce, kids fight over them, and if they're going to fight, they ought to at least fight over something less lame than frigging Easter eggs. In terms of religion, Easter pageants are fun and touching the first few times but start to feel a little morbid a few years in. "Does that guy get nailed up there again this year? Yeah, looks like he does. I remember back when Tommy Smith used to play Jesus. Tommy really sold the idea of dying for your sins. Too bad about that accident back in '02. Now you got that new guy, whatever the fuck his name is. Just isn't the same." You start to feel a little less sympathy for the dude when his death is reenacted the same damn way every time. It's not like your church spices up things a bit by having Jesus jump off the cross and smite his foes every once in a while. That would be worth seeing every year, especially if they didn't tell you what year Jesus would die or what year he would kick ass.

The thing about Easter is that it's not a very well thought-out holiday. The eggs are fun when you see them for the first time when you're five because they're colorful and pretty, but when you get home the realization starts to sink in: they're just eggs, man. Hardboiled eggs. They're not chocolate hard-boiled eggs or hard-boiled eggs with a chewy nougat center or anything. And to a kid, hard-boiled eggs are about the least fun food in the entire world. Broccoli is more fun-- it tastes like vomit but at least it looks funny and you can chase your sister around with it. If you throw a hard-boiled egg it might not even totally explode. Hard-boiled eggs couldn't possibly be more boring, and yet there you are with a basket full of a couple dozen hard-boiled eggs. In fact, the whole concept of Easter Egg Hunts very well may have been concocted by the Counsil for Hard Boiled Eggs on how to get kids interested, even if fleetingly, in such an incredibly boring food. "Do you think maybe kids will like 'em if we... Oh, I don't know, put little stickers on them or something?" "I think you're onto something, Jim. Let's call it Easter. I don't care if it's not a word! It's marketable!"

This is why as kids get older they start asking for chocolate bunnies up front. And solid ones, too. Everyone knows that parents who give hollow bunnies don't actually love their kids.
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with love from CRS @ 11:31 PM 

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