Easter Thursday

Back in California, I barely noticed Easter. Not being religious, of course, I didn’t pay much personal attention to it. I remember my (very Catholic) grandmother asking me what I was going to do for Easter one year and I hadn’t had a clue that Easter was coming up or why I should care about it. People in California were so heterogenous that it sometimes seemed difficult to find people who cared much about Easter — and even then, the ones who did went to church on Easter Sunday and had a nice meal with their families that evening. The people with little kids did the Easter egg hunt, because nothing celebrates the resurrection of God’s only son from the dead like telling your children outrageous and bizarre lies to the effect that a rabbit breaks into your house in the middle of the night and hides multi-colored hard-boiled eggs everywhere.

Last year, when I worked at the Law Office Of The Great Man, I was quite taken aback to find that Easter Monday was a day off work. I didn’t complain; Easter takes place in springtime, and the weather turns very nice here. (Even as I type, I am sitting outside on the screened porch, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, enjoying the view of the newly-green trees on Black Oak Ridge.) An unexpected day off work was pleasant, although I thought it was really silly since Easter is a) a religious holiday, not a civic one, and b) it happens on a Sunday, not a Monday. All the more unbelievable, the Great Man was displeased with me for giving the staff Veteran’s Day off work — that’s a legitimate, Federal holiday, when the courts would be closed and created by an Act of Congress. But Easter Monday, sure, take that off, even if you’re not Christian!

But just as I observed last year, people go a little bit nuts at Easter here in Knoxville. Everything and everybody gets a day off for Easter. I found out today that my paralegal class for tomorrow is being postponed by a week. There are no Muslim, Shinto, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, neo-pagan, Wiccan, or civic holidays occurring on Thursday. And when I asked my students about it last week, they hadn’t a clue that Thursday is Passover; the idea of going to a Seder seemed entirely alien to them and I doubt any of my students could pick a gefilte fish out of a lineup. So apparently, my class schedule is delayed to celebrate Easter Thursday, which is a new holiday to me. But a few students seemed a little bit upset at the idea that I would want them to show up to class three days before a religious holiday.

Just another blurring of the line between the secular and the sectarian that happens here in the land where the Bible Belt is buckled, I suppose. And for the most part, I’m pretty much out on my own in being bemused by that fact — everyone else here seems to take treating Easter as a civic holiday as a presumption, because of course it hasn’t ever occurred to them that some people don’t celebrate Easter.

Maybe tomorrow to commemorate Easter Thursday, I will buy some horseshoes. We have a horseshoe pit in the back yard here at La Casita Knoxvilla, and haven’t had any opportunity to use them. Horseshoes is the sort of game that you see being played every once in a while and you wonder how people ever get good at it because let’s face it, most people don’t exactly use a lot of horseshoes in daily life anymore. And horseshoes have as much relevance to Easter in my world view as does having to give my students Thursday off class.