Easter

Tomorrow is the beginning of the Easter long weekend. I absolutely love this time of year. Every year when the weather starts to slip into Autumn coolness, I wake up with a sense of quiet excitement that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Something about the air makes me feel good. I wake up with a smile on my face every day. I feel comfortable and happy and I just want the days to go for longer so I can enjoy them all the more.


I think the reason for this is that this time of year was always the highlight of my year when I was a kid. Easter meant chocolate and Easter Egg hunts and waking up to find that the Easter Bunny had been and hidden chocolate all around the place. My Mum’s side of the family is Greek, so that meant that most years I got to celebrate two separate Easters. As a little kid, the only thing better than an Easter full of sugary goodness was having two Easters full of sugary goodness.

On the night before Greek Easter, we would go to church and after the service all hundred-odd people in the church would light a candle and walk around the block. To this day I still have no real idea what it was all about, but when you’re little being part of a crowd that large and taking a candle-lit stroll is exciting.

On Greek Easter, we would head to my Aunty and Uncle’s house where all of the extended family would gather, and we would have a huge feast; the centrepiece of which was a full spit-roasted lamb.

Not long after all of the Easter goodness, it would be my birthday. I have so many happy memories attached to childhood birthdays that I couldn’t begin to recount them all. Our tradition on birthdays would be for the person whose birthday it was to wake up first and drag the other two siblings out of bed. We would all head to Mum & Dad’s room, where we would all pile onto the bed to open presents.


That’s a tradition that we held onto until we moved out of home. Even on my 21st birthday, we still all piled onto the bed and exchanged gifts. Birthdays may have lost a little of their tradition over the years but I still get this happy, excited feeling every year when we reach April.

Easter might not bring the chocolate and the Easter Bunny any more, but it does bring a four day weekend which is exciting in its own way.

I stopped going to church with my family a long time ago, but we still have our family Easter celebrations. We still head to my Aunty and Uncle’s place every year for the spit-roast and that’s where I will be this Sunday.


Like all religious celebrations, for me Easter is more about celebrating family than it is about biblical stories. And even though I’ve long stopped celebrating Easter for its traditional meaning, I believe that for the rest of my life, the traditions of my childhood will mean that I wake up one day in Autumn with that sense of quiet excitement that makes me smile for no real reason.