One day when I was lost

Not being a religious man, and having no kids in my daily routine, Easter has become one of those holidays that sort of catches me unawares. When I was little, we'd often spend Easter with my Grandma and her husband in Denver, dressing up to go to church after we'd torn apart our Easter baskets filled with goodies and divvied up the candy from inside the plastic eggs we'd found in as fair a way as possible. And when we didn't go to Denver, we'd decorate eggs at home and have our egg hunt on Sunday morning just the same.

It's always been sort of an odd holiday to me what with the candy like Halloween, decorations and tchotchkies akin to Christmas, the pagan fertility symbols of springtime, seemingly random timing tied to the phases of the moon, baskets filled with goodies like Christmas stockings but without the naughty-or-nice overtones, and the utterly unique egg-hunt. But still all tied up in a seriously Christian wrapper. Christmas may be like a big birthday party, but Easter, though... that's when the magic happened. However skeptical I might have been, it was hard not to be impressed at the drama of the tale of crucifixion and resurrection. And being hopped up on jelly beans, malted milk balls, chocolate bunnies and marshmallow peeps gave it all the more pizazz.

In any case, as an adult heathen cycling only between cublicle and 60-degree perpetual springtime, I've fallen out of touch with the rhythm and thrum of these things. So it caught me off-guard earlier this evening when I called my sister and the kids and they reported that they were decorating Easter eggs. Who knew?* I felt a few pangs of nostalgia and a sudden craving for deviled eggs, so after hanging up the phone I went immediately down to the store to pick up some eggs, vinegar and a PAAS dyeing kit.

I roped my friend Jeff into decorating eggs with me, and inspired my roommate Tranh, who had never dyed eggs before, to try her own hand at it. I also learned that I'm incredibly anal-retentive about proper dyeing technique and should probably never decorate eggs with Jeff again as he nearly pushed me over the edge tainting the dyes by double-dipping before the egg has properly dried and by failing to observe the light-to-dark progression.

Anyway, behold the results of our labors. Note the cherry blossom egg and the globe egg (with Asia facing) in particular.

*Ok, sure, it's in the calendar. And I could calculate it myself if I cared to. Though interestingly it's not just as simple as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. There are complex tables to calculate when Easter Sunday falls. And for the record, it's not just that it seemed early this year - it was in fact the second earliest Easter possible. Easter can never be earlier than March 22nd (and won't be until the year 2285) nor later than April 25th. And the next time Easter falls on March 23rd won't be until 2160. Weird.