It’s tricky to celebrate American holidays in the Middle East — Christmas doesn’t quite have that “over the river and through the woods” feel when we’re surrounded by honking horns, sand, and palm trees, though Southern California residents could say the same. And with British and Bahraini Mother’s Day both occurring on different days in March the greeting “Happy Mother’s Day” suddenly sends me into a panic that “it’s May already?” until I realize we’re working with a different calendar. But I think the most complicated holiday of them all is Easter.
Because our day of worship here is Friday and Sunday is a workday, we have to do a combined Good Friday/Easter Sunday service and then our resurrection celebration is over before those in the US have barely gotten through Maundy Thursday. And on Friday morning at church what do you say to greet friends? Happy Good Friday? That’s not a greeting regularly thrown around during those somber services with crosses and nails . . . but Happy Easter feels premature since it’s 2 days away.
Since we have to cover it all in one hour the service usually starts out somber, like you’d expect at a typical Good Friday service. Quiet reflection and songs about the cross and death, but midway through the tone shifts to the resurrection and ends with Christ the Lord Has Risen Today. It’s a bit of a whiplash and not the way I prefer to celebrate, but the fact that we can celebrate at all is something to sing praises about.
The difficult part is that once Friday morning is over the rest of the weekend is kind of “oh yeah, it’s Easter weekend,” but it feels like every other weekend and then Sunday comes and it’s business as usual and Josh goes to work and the kids may or may not have school (it has gone both ways. This year they made it a teacher work day so the kids could have off, but it’s not a “holiday.”) but it most definitely doesn’t feel like a holiday.
But this year girlie was old enough to know about the event and care about going so I made an exception. Caleb gave her some egg collecting strategies, but none of those could balance out my failure to provide a big enough basket.
I thought that would restrict the number of eggs she could collect, which would restrict the amount of crap that I had to bring home, but a fellow friend’s mom saw her trying to balance her eggs on top of each other and whipped out a plastic bag so she could collect all the loot she wanted.
And why is she out there solo? Because I didn’t want her to get run down by this mob:
