The first: When asked to say the prayer at Easter dinner, my then 5 year old cousin, Razie, said, "Sure! Here comes Peter Cottontail, hopping down the bunny trail. Hippity hoppity, Easter's on its way!"
The other story is from one of my favorite writers, David Sedaris. I know, I know. This is old and you have probably heard a million times, but here is the transcript from This American Life:
Act Five. Santa Claus Vs. The Easter Bunny.
Ira Glass
Act Five, Santa Claus Versus the Easter Bunny. A while back, writer David Sedaris moved to France, where he enrolled in a school to study French. He was the only American there. As he explained to an audience at City Arts and Lectures in San Francisco, the teacher could be kind of mean.
David Sedaris
Oh, she would throw chalk at people, and stabbed someone in the eye with a pencil one day, and would hold your homework paper over your head and show everyone the mistakes that you made. So I wrote a story about her. And she read it, and I got thrown out of school.
Ira Glass
This is another story about her, and about the big religious holidays, and the sheer arbitrariness of the way we celebrate sometimes. Easter eggs, Santa filling the stockings, all the non-religious icons.
David Sedaris
Printed in our textbooks was a brief list of major holidays alongside a scattered arrangement of photos capturing French people in the act of celebration. The object was to match the holiday with the corresponding picture. Today's discussion was dominated by a Russian nanny, two chatty Poles, and a pouty, plump Moroccan woman who had grown up speaking French and had enrolled in the class hoping to improve her spelling.
She had covered these lessons back in the third grade, and took every opportunity to demonstrate her superiority. She had recently transferred to the class. And we could not wait until she was booted up to her appropriate level. Midway through the first day, she had raised her hand so many times her shoulder had given out. Now she just leaned back in her seat and shouted the answers, her bronzed arms folded across her chest like some great grammar genie.
We had finished discussing New Year's Eve, and the teacher had moved on to Easter, which was represented in our textbook by a black and white photograph of a chocolate bell lying upon a bed of palm fronds. "And what does one do on Easter? Would anyone like to tell us?" It was, for me, another one of those holidays I'd just as soon avoid.
Growing up, my family had generally ignored the Easter celebrated by our non-Orthodox friends and neighbors, leading to the suspicion that we might be either Jews or Communists. As Greeks, we had our own Easter which was usually observed anywhere from two to four weeks after what was known in our circle as "the American version." The reason had to do with the moon or the Orthodox calendar, something mysterious like that. Though our mother always suspected it was scheduled at a later date so that the Greeks could buy their marshmallow chicks and plastic grass at drastically reduced sale prices. "The cheap sons of bitches," she'd say, "If they had their way, we'd be celebrating Christmas in the middle of god damn February."
A brave Italian was attempting to answer the teacher's latest question, when the Moroccan student interrupted, shouting, "Excuse me, but what's an Easter?" Despite having grown up in a Muslim country, it seems she might have heard it mentioned once or twice, but no. "I mean it," she said, "I have no idea what you people are talking about." The teacher then called upon the rest of us to explain. The Poles led the charge to the best of their ability.
"It is," said one, "a party for the little boy of God who call hisself Jesus and-- you know, like that." She faltered, and her fellow countrymen came to her aid. "He call hisself Jesus, and then he die one day on two morsels of lumber."
The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the Pope an aneurysm. "He die one day. And then he go above of my head to live with your father." "He weared the long hair. And after he died the first day, he come back here for to say hello to the peoples." "He nice. He make the good thing. And on the Easter, we be sad, because someone made him dead today."
Part of the problem had to do with grammar. Simple nouns, such as "cross" and "Resurrection," were beyond our grasp, let alone such complicated reflexive verbs as "to give of yourself your only begotten son." Faced with the challenge of explaining the cornerstone of Christianity, we did what any self-respecting group of people might do. We talked about food instead.
"Easter is a party for to eat of the lamb," an Italian student explained. "One, too, may eat of the chocolate." "And who brings the chocolate?" The teacher asked. I knew the word, and so I raised my hand saying, "The rabbit of Easter." "He bring of the chocolate."
My classmates reacted as though I had pinned the delivery on a house cat. They were mortified. A rabbit? A rabbit?
The teacher, assuming I had used the wrong word, positioned her index fingers on top of her head, wiggling them as though they were ears. "You mean one of these? A rabbit, rabbit?" "Well, sure," I said, "he come in the night when one sleep on a bed. With a hand, he have the basket, like for a bread."
The Moroccan rolled her eyes, and the teacher sadly shook her head as if this explained everything that was wrong with my country. "No, no," she said, "here in France, the chocolate is brought by a big bell that flies in from Rome." I called for a time-out. "But how do the bell know where you live?" "Well," she said, "how does a rabbit?" It was a decent point, but at least a rabbit has eyes. That's a start.
Rabbits move from place to place, while most bells can only go back and forth. And they can't even do that on their own power. On top of that, the Easter bunny has character. He's someone you'd like to meet. A bell has all the personality of a cast iron skillet. It's like saying that come Christmas, a magic dust pan flies in from the North Pole, led by eight flying cinder blocks.
Who wants to stay up all night, so they can see a bell? And why fly one in from Rome when they've got more bells than they know what to do with right there in Paris? That's the most implausible aspect of the whole story. Because there's no way the bells of France would allow a foreign worker to fly in. There's no way the bells of France would allow a foreign worker to fly in and take their job. That Roman bell would be lucky to get work cleaning up after a French bell's dog.
And how does a bell hold the candy if it doesn't have any arms? How does it get into your house without being heard? It just didn't add up. I suppose similar questions could be asked of the Easter bunny. I had just never thought about it that hard.
Nothing we said was of any help whatsoever to the Moroccan woman. Clearly disgusted, she just sat there, her lips positioned as if to spit. I wondered then if, without the language barrier, my classmates and I could have done a better job making sense of Christianity, an idea that sounds pretty far-fetched to begin with. In communicating any religious belief, the operative word is faith, a concept illustrated by our very presence in that classroom. Why bother struggling with the lessons of a six-year-old if each of us didn't believe that, against all reason, we might eventually improve? I'm not sure how that fits in with the Resurrection, but if I could hope to one day carry on a fluent conversation, it was a relatively short leap to believing that a rabbit might visit my home in the middle of the night, leaving behind a handful of chocolate kisses and a carton of menthol cigarettes. A bell though, that's [BLEEP] up.
Here, I had spent all this time feeling intimidated by French people and for nothing. The next time the teacher humiliated me or someone at the market gave me a hard time, I'd just roll my eyes like the Moroccan woman, thinking, "Well, what can you do with a nation of people who'll apparently believe in anything?"
Ira Glass
Writer David Sedaris.
