Something Else for Easter

Easter, 2012. My little girl's first words when she awoke this morning: ‘One more day to go’. She’s been counting down for over a week. When the counter hits zero tomorrow she will be going, with her nanny, her great nanny, cousins and more attenuated family to Connelly's Marsh, for the annual Easter Festivities. ‘We will swim every day’, she tells me, ‘even if it’s cold. And on Sunday we will hunt for eggs’.

Her excitement is infectious. I've been looking forward to Easter also, even though I'm not going. Connelly's Marsh Easters are a custom perpetuated by her mum's family.

I have more than a few issues with Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and other myths that Grace's mum thinks are ‘part of growing up’. Are we inculcating kids with a capacity to believe stuff that makes no sense? Are UFOs and palmistry, miracle workers and homeopathy what results if you tell kids that lies are true?

Woody Allen tells a tale in Annie Hall which has no purpose here other than the punch line. A man goes to see an analyst. ‘It's not about me, doc, it's about my brother. You got to help him. He thinks he's a chook’. ‘Well, you'd better bring him in then’. ‘I would, but I need the eggs’.

Grace has a way of dealing with my cynicism about this stuff. ‘I know you don't believe in the Easter Bunny, daddy, but I do’. I suspect she doesn't, but she needs the eggs.

Easter. The first Sunday after the first full moon after the autumnal (for us) equinox (except for the fact that the date of Easter is computed using the Julian calendar and it’s thirteen days out, and the equinox is not necessarily on the right day, and the calculation of the date of the full moon is spastic).

Easter. The celebration of our saviour recovering from a (very) near-death experience. One of the most remarkable events of Christ's remarkable career was being born on a solar calendar and then dying (nearly, and then for good, so far, unless you are a Swedenborgian) on a lunar calendar.

Easter bunnies are fertility symbols, as are eggs. The northern hemisphere spring approximately corresponds with Easter, a time when rabbits breed like rabbits. Our rabbits are pests, of course. It took several attempts to establish a population on the mainland of Australia, but in Tasmania rabbits were already in plague proportions twenty years after white settlement.

Easter, 1990. I was with two friends at the Red Lion hotel, then a rock venue, now an undeserved winner of Australian tourism awards as The Old Woolstore. Don't think for a moment I'm bitter. After all, MONA got an honourable mention at the Tasmanian engineering awards. Anyway, one of my friends was carping about his inability to meet women. I attributed his problem, and a similar issue I had, to our unwillingness to engage them in conversation. Pressed to demonstrate how such a conversation would take place, and emboldened by alcohol, I spoke to three girls in a group.

One was wearing a large pendant crucifix. I said, ‘If this were yesterday I would be nailed to that cross’. A poor gambit, I know, but my skills with ladies were, and are, limited. One of them, the one wearing the crucifix, gave me a chuckle. And then she gave me a child. A lovely child whom she named Jamie.

Perhaps out of an excess of cadness, perhaps because of the young lady coming to her senses, I had sex with Jamie's mum only that night and the next morning, which puts me in the unusual position of being able to calculate the gestation period that preceded Jamie's debut. Jamie is now twenty-one, and I can remember my pale pick-up line from twenty-two years ago. Here survivor bias rears its rational head, I wouldn't remember lines like that if they didn't lead to fornication, and then to conception.

Jamie was conceived on either Easter Monday or Tuesday, 1990, the 16^th and 17^th of April (Easter came late that year, I did not). Between the first of those days, the most likely date of conception, since I was primed by a considerable dry spell before that date, and Jamie's birthday on January 13^th 1991, 273 days elapsed. The mean human gestation duration is 266 days so Jamie was about 87 per cent likely to be born earlier. This is significant because had she been born earlier her 21^st birthday would not have interrupted MONA FOMA.

If you're going shagging this Easter and you lack the decency to commit to basic social niceties like condoms you should reconsider your carnality. Because Easter is a bit earlier this year than 1990, your acts of wanton lust will not impact upcoming MOFOs, but you might have to give future Falls a miss.

Easter, 1972 (approximately). My father was a greyhound trainer. He along with many of his brethren (training greyhounds is a religion, you see) believed that key to making greyhounds try hard, race as fast as they can, is to convince them that the mechanical lure they are supposed to chase is, in fact, alive. To achieve this some of them give a dog a live kill. The procedure: tie a rabbit or a possum to a fishing line on an industrial reel, and allow the dog to chase it while reeling it in. After a few hundred metres allow the dog to catch the sacrificial beast, and slaughter it. On Good Friday that year, when I was ten, I went with dad and a friend to a farm in Sandford, and we tortured and sacrificed a possum. I would like to say that my disgust was palpable, and that it planted the seed of my later vegetarianism. As far as I remember I simply accepted it. Dad, whom I already didn't trust, told me it was necessary and I must have thought that was reasonable. I also didn't consider the torture and slaughter of the roast chicken we had (‘we’ doesn't include dad) the following Sunday, Easter Sunday, that had been raised in a cage with so many others that they had to stand atop one another. And I didn't consider the possibility that the concealed barbarity, the feast of the chicken, is the most heinous, it being perpetuated as a societal calumny, no individual in the chain accountable, rendering the chain unbreakable.

Easter as a focus of belief seems absurd. Easter as a place-marker for events that shape a life seems reasonable. And Easter as a holiday, as a celebration of values, whatever those values, seems essential.

Happy Easter. May all your eggs be free-range and all your bunnies be chocolate.