easter baskets redux

I was talking today with a co-worker about the golem legend and how it appears in other forms throughout literature such as Frosty the Snowman and Pinocchio, and somehow discussion trailed as it is wont to do onto other subjects.

The issue of how we celebrate our religious holidays with the extra trappings came up, and I mentioned the dilemma we faced over the Easter eggs. I shared with him how we resolved it at our house, which he found fascinating: As Evangeline and I boiled the eggs and dyed them, I explained to her that just as we change the eggs' nature and appearance every Easter, putting our faith in Christ changes our nature and our appearance to the Father so that when he looks on us he sees his Son. In other words, I made the Easter message a central part of the Easter eggs so that they're not a distraction from the meaning of the day.

It was great -- not only did I get to use Easter eggs to teach my daughter something, I was able to use them to share my faith with a co-worker in a completely nonoffensive and nonintrusive way.

We didn't do an Easter basket this year because it didn't occur to me in time how to do it, but next year we're going to use the Easter basket as a metaphor for searching for Truth and then discovering him in the person of Christ. If I get really fancy, we could leave the Easter basket somewhere on Saturday night, and then on Sunday when Evangeline goes to look for it, she'll discover it's not there and have to go looking for it, just as Christ's friends found his body had disappeared unexpectedly.