“I’m not saying church is bad. I’m just saying God is better.” ~Kevin Smith, on Dogma
5 April 2005Given that we now have Baby Jesus Karaoke and Pope Death Watch 2005 behind us, let’s relive how people with my last name celebrate Easter…
Went home on saturday night so I could get up at the first light to go to church with dad & stepmom. They usually go to 7 am, but relented and went to 10:30 so that their lazy children could join them. Also, that was when dad was assigned to lector, and my stepmom is a eucharistic minister, proving to all of the other couples that my parents are Way Better Catholics than they will ever be. So I put on my Easter shoes and we leave for mass 40 minutes before it’s scheduled to begin. Let me now point out that our church is less than 1.5 miles away from our front door. I’ve walked there in 15 minutes before. I digress.
Dad has a yearly speech he gives on Easter and this time he didn’t miss a trick. If there’s one thing in life he hates, it’s the people that only show up to church on Easter and Christmas, thus limiting the parking and pew selections for those of us that are vastly more pious. “I really think that they should give some thought to accommodating the regulars on days like this when they’re expecting high volume.” His complaints were a little valid– we were there half an hour early, and dad should have a pew reserved for him and his hangers on to watch him proclaim the word of the Lord, but the place was so packed with dudes in seersucker blazers and small children wearing sweater vests that we got split up anyway. I got to sit next to Peej, who does fun stuff like telling me what time signature all of the songs are in and ranting about how young girls shouldn’t be wearing short shirts. (“Okay, no daughter of MINE would be allowed out of the house in a skirt like that and a shirt that says ‘Me Myself and Shopping’…. particularly not on effing EASTER!”) and we were kind of facing the parents so we got to wave at them a lot and mime throttling each other in their general direction and generally act like we were in the monkey habitat at the Bronx zoo and not a house of God.
After mass ends my dad is shooting the breeze with two of the priests and he actually brings up his “accommodating the regulars” idea. I decide it’s a good idea to say “yeah, you guys should have a punch card system, like a subway sandwich shop. You get a card on ash wednesday, and you have to have it stamped at least 4 times in order to get in the door on easter. That’ll fix everything.” And they kind of looked at me like “hey didn’t you graduate/ move out/ we didn’t really like you when you were in youth group so why don’t you be quiet now. Nice shoes, though.”
Since my divorced parents live .7 miles from one another in the same zip code, no holiday goes unsplit. So we cruise over to mom’s side of the family where they are, naturally, drinking champagne in honor of the risen lord. My easter basket from my mom contained one of the bras I really like from Victorias Secret and 61* on DVD. We like to buck tradition. (My easter basket at my dad’s had the greatest thing ever in it, in the form of lenox crystal turtle shaped salt and pepper shakers. Naturally, I filled both with salt and they live on the coffee table. Peej pointed out that he had one more peep than I did, and I responded by biting the head off of his additional peep. Since he is not the whiny bitch that I am and is used to sporadic and unprompted torture from his only sister– I once cut down his tire swing just to be mean, and have spent the last 13 years apologizing for that– Peej took it like a man, and then perked up immediately when I suggested that we explode some peeps in the microwave, then perked up even more when our parents let us do it. Just another moment for their big mental scrapbook of “Remind me again how much we paid to send her to college.”)
Anyhoo, in addition to throwing back the bubbly on every available holiday, my mom’s family has the tradition of giving kids movies in their easter baskets (I recall specifically being totally jealous one year in elementary school when Erin got Drop Dead Fred), hence me getting 61*. Danny got Saw, the creepy horror movie starring Princess Bride dude, and Erin made out with Chris Rock Never Scared, the DVD of the HBO special he did last year. I bet you can see where this is going.
Cut to: my extended family, from the youngest (matt, high school senior) to the oldest (mommy) with everyone in between watching Chris Rock on Easter Sunday. Erin’s mom seemed to be having difficulty hearing cause after something got a big laugh she would go “what? what did he say?” and my mom would go “he said, ‘you aint never getting your pussy eaten again.’” I am not kidding at all. Now factor in the fact that half of my cousins are black (or, as logic would dictate if you want to get technical, half black) and that all of Chris Rock’s humor can be summed up by saying “Man, black people and white people sure are different!”
Glory to God in the highest… and peace to his people on earth. Happy easter, indeed.
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