Chocolate bunnies are delicious

Today happens to be Easter. As I write this I have a giant chocolate bunny for company. Unfortunately she is not a very good listener due to her ears having been eaten off by yours truly earlier today. Nonetheless what she lacks in ears she makes up for it by being very delicious.

I love Easter. It is my second favourite holiday of the year. I don’t see it much as the day Jesus was rose from the grave but rather as the one day where I get to stuff my face with chocolate and not feel guilty about it. I have had a very pleasant day doing just that. It was also the first Easter where, after the traditional, yet brutally competitive Easter egg hunt, I had no plans, no family braais or dinners to get dressed for. It was a day for pyjamas, chocolate, a warm bath and multiple episodes of Downton Abbey. I also had to fix my sisters trophy which had fallen to the floor in a struggle for a candy-coated egg. All is fair in love and war... and Easter egg hunts too.

I should have some kind of excuse for or meaning behind spending a day doing absolutely nothing, let alone breaking a trophy and consuming copious amounts of calories. Easter does have some reason for it, right? The rising of Jesus Christ is one of them but after a few weeks of church when I was seventeen, I decided that neither God nor Jesus was the root of anything that went on in my life, including me gnawing on rabbit-shaped chocolate.

There are, however, other meanings behind Easter. The Easter egg was originally a Pagan symbol of new life. The egg illustrated the end of winter and beginning of spring in the Northern hemisphere. It was the end of one cycle and the promising beginning of another. My mother, who grew up in Scotland, remembers rolling painted Easter eggs down grassy hills as the warm rays of spring sunshine touched her winter-paled shoulders. Easter is a promise of the things that are to come. It is New Year’s Eve with eggs and hot-cross buns instead of fireworks.

 

I therefore propose a toast. I raise my half-eaten Easter egg to the beginning of a new cycle. It is a slightly colder one but it is still new. May you have a lovely Easter, become sick from too much chocolate and have a fantabulous new cycle, or at least a better one than my chocolate bunny. She has now lost her face.  Cheers.