Another holiday come and gone and we find ourselves befuddled by a culture that is so much like ours...and yet is so not "ours".
Easter. In our non-religious household, Easter is about the Easter bunny. And the Easter basket. Wooo-Hooo! The haul of the Easter basket! Well placed between Christmas and late Spring Birthday's, the Easter basket represented a mid level gift giving holiday.
My own Easter baskets as a child were filled with candy, bubbles, new jump ropes, chalk, silly putty and various other fun outdoor toys. I mean - EASTER! We can go outside and play with those bubbles!
This tradition has passed to Emily who gets a plethora of fun things in her Easter basket.
This years haul included:
Playmobil Easter Bunny School Set
Peter Pan DVD
New fancy sparkly jump rope
a magic stapler
A sparkle baton
scented bubbles (3)
Bath salts and bath bombs
glue sticks
colored sidewalk chalk
silly putty
Stickers and fun notebooks
scented gel pens
a festive easter snowglobe
a few pieces of good chocolate
and some other things I am surely forgetting
She is an only child , and yes - gets more than she probably should - but I love to see her find the basket and the contents.
When she went upstairs to give the neighbors some easter chocolate, she discovered a ( to her) horrifying fact.
THEY DON'T HAVE EASTER BASKETS! Sure, they got some candy - but there was no massive haul, as indicated by her life experiences. This was confounded further by the invitation to participate in their egg hunt in the front yard.
By all external indications, they celebrate Easter - but No basket? There was a two year old with NO BASKET? What kind of sick world is this when the Easter bunny clearly stops downstairs and fills and "almost nine year old" girls basket chockablock full and ignores the 2 year old upstairs?
So we started asking people here- Did they get Easter baskets? And we began to find that No - most of them didn't. Sure, they got some easter candy - but no massive basket filled with goodies. Heck, most got no gifts on Easter at all.
I am finding that living in Canada is like this. So many things are the same. Mirror images of our life in the States...and then something comes along and I realize we are not IN the states anymore. Our cultural identity - our cultural habits are just that - bound by the culture we have grown up living in. I realize that we are Americans living in Canada and that we are obviously different.
That is a strange feeling.
April 2007, Gimlet Eye
In the last stretches here folks, Dissertation has to be handed in within a few weeks and I am running at a breakneck pace to try and figure out how to simultaneously edit, write, and format this behemoth ( I suspect the final edition will clock in at about 180 pages) - while coping with a job search ( it looks like I will be employed after all!) and your normal every day sensitive Cat with bizarre rashes, rabbits who demand obeisance, Teen daughters with hormones run amok and 50-year-old husband who dances in front of me despite the obvious baleful glares shot at him over computer screens.
All in all, exhausting - but oddly familiar. Thanks for bearing with me through this.
Dawn
Easter. In our non-religious household, Easter is about the Easter bunny. And the Easter basket. Wooo-Hooo! The haul of the Easter basket! Well placed between Christmas and late Spring Birthday's, the Easter basket represented a mid level gift giving holiday.
My own Easter baskets as a child were filled with candy, bubbles, new jump ropes, chalk, silly putty and various other fun outdoor toys. I mean - EASTER! We can go outside and play with those bubbles!
This tradition has passed to Emily who gets a plethora of fun things in her Easter basket.
This years haul included:
Playmobil Easter Bunny School Set
Peter Pan DVD
New fancy sparkly jump rope
a magic stapler
A sparkle baton
scented bubbles (3)
Bath salts and bath bombs
glue sticks
colored sidewalk chalk
silly putty
Stickers and fun notebooks
scented gel pens
a festive easter snowglobe
a few pieces of good chocolate
and some other things I am surely forgetting
She is an only child , and yes - gets more than she probably should - but I love to see her find the basket and the contents.
When she went upstairs to give the neighbors some easter chocolate, she discovered a ( to her) horrifying fact.
THEY DON'T HAVE EASTER BASKETS! Sure, they got some candy - but there was no massive haul, as indicated by her life experiences. This was confounded further by the invitation to participate in their egg hunt in the front yard.
By all external indications, they celebrate Easter - but No basket? There was a two year old with NO BASKET? What kind of sick world is this when the Easter bunny clearly stops downstairs and fills and "almost nine year old" girls basket chockablock full and ignores the 2 year old upstairs?
So we started asking people here- Did they get Easter baskets? And we began to find that No - most of them didn't. Sure, they got some easter candy - but no massive basket filled with goodies. Heck, most got no gifts on Easter at all.
I am finding that living in Canada is like this. So many things are the same. Mirror images of our life in the States...and then something comes along and I realize we are not IN the states anymore. Our cultural identity - our cultural habits are just that - bound by the culture we have grown up living in. I realize that we are Americans living in Canada and that we are obviously different.
That is a strange feeling.
April 2007, Gimlet Eye
In the last stretches here folks, Dissertation has to be handed in within a few weeks and I am running at a breakneck pace to try and figure out how to simultaneously edit, write, and format this behemoth ( I suspect the final edition will clock in at about 180 pages) - while coping with a job search ( it looks like I will be employed after all!) and your normal every day sensitive Cat with bizarre rashes, rabbits who demand obeisance, Teen daughters with hormones run amok and 50-year-old husband who dances in front of me despite the obvious baleful glares shot at him over computer screens.
All in all, exhausting - but oddly familiar. Thanks for bearing with me through this.
Dawn
6 Baleful Regards:
This isn't a cross Canada thing, I think you have fucked up neighbours. We do it up right.
write something new or don't post, imho
Oh Anonymous, with your ip if 99.90.154..writing on your ipad, I apologize if finishing my dissertation bores you and my writing on this blog - which you read for free - is not up to your standards of "freshness"
but may I - IMHO - tell you to suck it?
For I am.
Telling you to suck it.
You can tell me to suck it. I deserved it. :) I just really like your writing. Good luck with your dissertation and congrats on accepting a position.
And to better word, it gets confusing to me when I go to read a post and it was from four years ago...I wonder why you re-post rather than just not posting at all?
Well Ok. Soften me up with compliments.
I re-post these older ones because they were on Gimlet Eye, and when ClubMom disintegrated that blog, I moved the posts over to my draft folder here, so as not to lose them.
Therefore, while they are "old" they never were published here. My overall idea is that I will have everything under one blog.
As to why publish old? Well I am supposed to do a minimum # of posts per a contract. I try to meet the obligation using some of posts that many people might not have seen before 9 and the gimlets in draft). I think some of my best stuff was in 2005-2006 but I doubt most readers will dig back into those archives to review.
Actually, I am going to have to think about how this blog is going to continue to exist - in terms of what I write and how I write. The whole game is changing for me, not to mention the ways in which the internet and blogging has also changed.
It is something I am going to have to put my mind around.
Post a Comment