Lengthening the Season

I remember when we were kids, with my Lola around, no one’s supposed to talk or laugh aloud during Holy Week, as early as Monday. No one’s supposed to go out, sweep the yard or take a bath after 3pm on Good Friday. Worse, no TV, no radio, no nothing. All you get are those crazy multi-colored columns which go “toooooot”. If you think life is hard, I think it was harder then for us.

Today, you can talk and laugh as much as you want, and by golly, you can even turn your house upside down from Holy Monday to Easter Sunday and nobody will admonish you for doing so. You can in fact reside in your bathroom the entire Good Friday, even after the Seven Last Words and nobody will holler at you. And thank God for cable TV. Nobody’s going to bore himself to death.

I also remember Mama boiling a dozen or so eggs every Easter Sunday morning. After attending the 9am Mass, my siblings and I would troop to her garden and start egg-hunting. Mama used to decorate the eggs with her colored markers and she would attach a 25-centavo coin to each egg with masking tape. Afterwards, we would count how many each one of us got.  Yup, those were simple but lovely years of my life that money, not even Mastercard, could buy.

These Easter memories prompted me to continue the tradition, this time with my two children Caitlin and Caehl, my one and only niece Meg and my two nephews Dominic and Dean. See related photo album (Easter Egg Hunt at #9 Santos St.). Not exactly grandiose
but enough to create memories, one that will make you look back at your childhood fondly and one that puts a warm glow in your heart.

I hope years from now, we will still have those no-fuss pure and unadulterated activities for them and that when they grow older and get together someday, they would reminisce about their own childhood with fond memories the way we do now. It is when you recall happy and loving times such as these that you’d want to stretch the years so you would have more time together, do more things together.