In my religious experience, Palm Sunday is generally heralded as the beginning of the Happy Happy Easter Season. Churches take the opportunity to give the kiddos palm branches (or some equivalent) and there is much rejoicing and heralding of the King of Kings. Myself, I enjoyed watching the children of our church singing, waving their unidentified vegetation, jumping up and down, and singing about the coming of Jesus.
But what has always struck me, and what our pastor wisely pointed out today, was the superficiality of the original celebration. The people shouting Hosanna as Jesus rode by on a donkey were the same ones that condemned him to death a few (just a few!) days later. How fickle are our hearts; how easily we change alliances.
This is why I greatly appreciated sharing the Lord's Supper after the sermon today. It gave me a chance to tie things together for Anna: the symbolism of communion, importance of Easter, the warning that Palm Sunday provides. We should celebrate the coming of Jesus, we should wave palm branches, we should shout Hosanna. Every single day.
Which brings me to my next thought: what to do about the Easter Bunny? I decided to let Santa Claus in, since he's viewed here as something akin to a fairy. [We fervently believe in fairies.] In contrast, the Easter Bunny is a large mammal in pastels which provides chocolate and hides eggs.
I dunno. When I write it out like that, he/she/it doesn't seem much different than St. Nick. He just feels faker, if that's a word. I think I'm going to skip the bunny. We (okay, I) dislike rabbits, anyway. The local ones eat my tulip bulbs and day lilies.
I think you already know this? But what we do is that we are OK with having images of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, etc around our house and pretending but we don't tell the girls that they are real. It was important to me to always be clear and honest about what is real and what is pretend, especially given how hard it is to explain about an invisible God who does miracles. We play fairies and read books about fairies and pretend that they live in the yard and whatnot, but Grace knows what is real and what isn't.
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