Easter memories

 Palm Harbor memories

  I grew up (until age twelve) in Palm Harbor. At some point, the town was planned to be more grand than it turned out to be. There were parts of the town that had curbs and palm trees planted as a planned project. But it failed (or never actually came about) in any event, there was a meager downtown. The road had a hill that sloped down through town and ended at 19A. At the top of the hill, you could see the gulf of Mexico in the distance. 

  I mention all of this to set up that the town used to come together to put on an Easter sunrise service and the crosses were placed on that hill. The entire town in various ways participated. The person who played Jesus was always a guarded secret but there were children who participated and elders all in costume. They borrowed a donkey for this production (entering the city on a donkey with people waving palms) and people took turns keeping it during this production  (practice and such. I think our family kept it a few times, I have a few different pictures of me with the donkey over the years. 

  My dad built some of the sets and once, when the newspaper came to take pictures about the production, came at a time there were no actors, so someone convinced him to dress up as a biblical character. It's one of the most surreal images of our father and I need to get a photo of it for this blog at some point. Getting up so early in the morning and getting there in time (earlier if someone was in the play) because the play actually started before dark and timed with the sunrise happening during the crucifixion. 

  After the sunrise service, we would head to our own church and have Easter service as well. Afterwards, we got to really enjoy our Easter Baskets and have a big dinner.

  Because we lived in Florida, we never actually had easter egg hunts. One, the dogs or other animals would have gotten the eggs long before we could. It was often hot and the eggs might spoil. Then too, we just had too much church to do. My mother hid our baskets in the house and we would do a grand search for them BEFORE we left for church (and sunrise service) but we could never eat any of it then. The baskets were fully loaded and that was probably evenly divided amongst us. We might find a basket, but it was the wrong color and had someone else's name then we had to be quiet about it and keep looking for ours.

  I mentioned colors of the baskets because our lives (from my age of 3 until 12 or so) was all about color coded things. When my cousins came to live with us, that added 5 more kids and so brought the total up to 8.  Of course, the two elders were grown and almost gone in short order. Anyway, my mother decided that the easiest way to organize everything was to assign colors and everything became easily identifiable. My color was Yellow and so my cup, toothbrush, sheets, towels and so on was always yellow. My Easter basket had a stripe of yellow, while others might have a stripe of pink or blue or green and so on.

  Back then, if they had plastic eggs you could fill, we didn't have them. We were always rooting around in the plastic grass to make sure we found all the jelly beans and small wrapped chocolate eggs that were loose there. We had the Hard boiled eggs and they were colored. I didn't like the yolks and my next door neighbor (Jullee) didn't like the whites so we would always eat our Easter eggs together. 

  My father rarely participated in making any holiday special. It all fell to my mother to make sure we had Easter baskets, dresses fit for Easter Sunday, and all other holidays gifts and special events. He was raised very poor and didn't grow up with any of this either. I'm not privy to discussions between them, but everything seemed to work out and I didn't feel deprived. I'm sure she talked about the need for these events forcefully. 

   Now that I'm grown and have children of my own that are grown, I look back on how we would set the baskets up and we would go to church. I would spend time taking pictures of the kids in the front yard while Steve hid the eggs in the back. This is one of my favorite pictures. After we had taken each individual kid's picture and the group serious one (or a few) we'd do goofy ones. Really, stalling until Steve gave the all clear for the hunt in the back yard. Of course, more pictures would follow as they looked for eggs. I would cook Ham and parsley potatoes and typically a couple veggies too for Easter dinner. 

Happy Easter!