Easter goes retail

The Boston Herald

The thing I always liked about Easter, the holiday, as opposed to Easter the holy day, was its simplicity. It was like the season it landed in, fine all by itself. It didn't need to be dressed up the way Christmas is. It didn't need bright lights and tinsel and bold colors like red and gold and green. Easter was pastels and cotton dresses and live bunnies and stuffed chicks and tulips and lilies in plastic pots, and a natural softening of the earth and the soul. There was a lightness about the day, an unencumbered joy.

Now Easter's gone retail. Pretty baskets with colorful fake grass full of jelly beans and marshmallow eggs are no longer good enough. People are forced to give Easter presents. Parents actually line up in stores to buy their children toys, not just bubbles or a game of jacks, but Christmas-birthday-type extravagant toys.

It's crazy.

We constantly complain about having so much to do that we don't have enough time, that we especially don't have time for ourselves. So how do we handle this? We make life even more difficult by taking a holiday that used to require little maintenance and turning it into a mini Christmas.

Last Sunday hundreds of people, mothers mostly, mobbed Bradlees' department stores and waited in hourlong lines for the chance to buy their children a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger. I understand the mindset. I did the same thing for a Teddy Ruxpin years ago. It was a different toy and a different holiday, but the need to surprise-please-satisfy the small person whose life I was molding was the same.

In retrospect, I shake my head at the woman who believed a Teddy Ruxpin or any toy was the essence of a holiday. When I look back at Christmases and Easters, when my children look back, they don't talk about the things they got. My daughter has never said that Teddy Ruxpin made her day. What we all remember are the people who stop by, the sense of continuity that connects the past and present. What makes a holiday special is the same thing that makes an ordinary day special: having time to spend with people we care about.

The mad rush for things takes time away from these people. The holiday arrives and you're too worn out preparing for the day to enjoy it. It becomes something you have to get through, one more thing to endure.

It's hard not to get caught up in all this. How can you not give Easter gifts when everyone else does? How can your child or grandchild wake up to a small basket when his friends get a bike, a swing set, roller blades? 

And so we follow the crowd, into the malls, into the stores, into the long lines and onto the merry-go-round. There's been this trend lately of not giving up anything for Lent, of taking on something instead, of doing more for other people, which is good. There are so many people who need extra attention and help.

But so do the doers. Lent used to be a time when the merry-go-round stopped. It was a period of reflection and denial, the weeks leading up to Easter somber and strict. You couldn't get married during Lent. You couldn't go to a dance or a party. You couldn't eat between meals, and three meals could only equal two. People gave up movies or candy or ice cream. The idea was not to make life miserable for everyone but to reduce life to its essentials. The idea was to create time and space in which a few thoughts about Easter as a holy day would have space to grow.

The space to grow is being squeezed out of us bit by bit. It isn't enough that the kids have Easter outfits and baskets. It isn't enough that we hide Peeps and chocolate eggs throughout the house. It isn't enough that we have family over for a meal. We need to have presents at the table, gifts waiting in the wings.