My Cadbury Creme Egg Is Bittersweet This Year

What a strange day. It's ostensibly Good Friday around these parts, but you'd never know it.

The Husband and I both had to work. The kids were off, but it was a plain ol' teacher inservice, and they just hung out at their Kids Club all day. Then I quickly hit the grocery store on the way home before picking the kids up in time to greet The Girl's BFF who is here for a belated birthday sleepover.

So different from where we usually are on Good Friday. Usually we boot it out of the cities as soon as possible after work on Thursday and head north, trying to get a jump on traffic and buy ourselves some time so we can do back-road detours around Emerson because the 75 is always closed. We get to Grandma's house in the wee hours and head straight to bed because we're up early the next morning to head to church.

We celebrate Good Friday with our Canada church friends, and there's always a bit of homecoming mixed in with the coffee and singing. Then it's off to a family gathering, knowing we get to hang out with the other side of the fam the next day.

But there's a heavy price to pay for all those good times, namely arriving back home after a long, floody drive late on Sunday night, knowing that we have a whole week of school and work ahead of us.

So this year we decided to stay put. And I won't say that I wasn't sad this morning, sitting at my desk reading developer notes while I knew my nears and dears were singing Were You There. But I was also happy, remembering last night's Maundy Thursday supper at our US church.

It was so great - a simple meal of soup and bread interspersed with communion, singing, and readings. All generations around the same table. The Boy and The Girl each doing a reading (he almost got "Gethsemane," although with his permanent retainer, his "th's" all sound like "s's" anyway). I loved the children's story, where the kids gathered around a real seder platter and shared the elements of a Passover meal. And how they each got unleavened bread (aka a pita chip) and some wine (aka a grape) so they could participate in communion, too.

I expect Easter Sunday will be the same. I'll be missing my family and my Canada friends, but I'll be loving up a new tradition of an Easter Breakfast (oh yeah - we're totally Mennonites. There's always food). And eating chocolate - because that's the same no matter where you say "Christ is Risen."