Happy Easter!

There have always been two schools of thought in the Christian churchgoing community regarding those folks who only attend services on Christmas and Easter (lovingly referred to by some as "C and E-ers.")  The one school says that twice a year is better than never.  The other holds that people who don't attend services any other week of the year shouldn't be taking up valuable seat space in the packed churches of major-religious-occasion-time, which could otherwise be occupied by more regular churchgoers.  

I have to admit that I do see both sides of the argument.  I'd also like to add for the record that some of the most "Christian" (as in behavior, not in name) people I know are galloping atheists who also happen to believe in the Golden Rule and act accordingly, so as far as I'm concerned, church attendance is not necessarily connected in any way with whether or not people are decent human beings.  I would say, however, that if you do consider yourself a believer and it ain't important enough for you to be at services any of the other 50 weeks a year, well...not sure it would make that much difference to any deity I'd care to believe in whether or not your butt was in a seat for one of the big 2 Sundays.  At that point, I'd think you might as well continue being whatever kind of human you are the other 50 weeks a year wherever you normally go about doing it without worrying too much about putting on a bonnet and pastels, but maybe that's just me.

One final observation, however: any person with the most casual and nodding acquaintance with religion knows that churches fill up quickly on Christmas and Easter mornings.  If you show up ten minutes LATE for one of those services, expect both full pews and incredulous stares when you wander in and start looking for a seat.

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We had our traditional Easter morning of o-dark-thirty wakeup (well, 0630, but that's still early enough) followed by Easter basket hunting.  Even the resident teenaged boy still gets into it, surprisingly.  Taking a leaf from my parents' book while I was growing up, we put together individual treasure hunts for each kid's basket, complete with codes and puzzles.  Petunia had cryptograms to solve, each leading her to the next plastic egg and clue.  Thing Two's code was a lettershift cipher that resulted in words with scrambled letters, so his was slightly more complicated than Petunia's.  He got stuck on a word or two, but in general breezed through his series of eggs to his basket just as she did.

I changed things up a bit for Thing One, however.   Yesterday, while watching Petunia scrambling for eggs at our town's Easter Egg Hunt, he looked wistfully at me and observed that he wished he could participate too (the cutoff is fifth grade, so it was even the last year for her.)  On the spot I decided that I was going to redo things for him this year so that he had to find all of his eggs first and then figure out what to do with them, as opposed to having one egg lead him to the next as we've usually done.  And I recalled with glee that I had the PERFECT eggs for him on hand already.

        
So, this morning, one of these little beauties was waiting for him outside his bedroom door. I told him there were seven more just like it hidden downstairs and to get busy looking.  As a side note, the best place to hide these was six inches over his head on doorframes.  Absolutely priceless how long it took him to find those.  :)

Each egg was numbered and contained the names of two professional soccer players.  The puzzle involved figuring out the country of origin of each player and knowing its capital city, thus combining his loves of soccer and geography into one puzzle.  He got his egg hunt after all, he had a lot of fun doing it, and he found his basket.  I call that a win, especially for a nearly fifteen year-old boy!

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Whatever you are celebrating today, enjoy: Easter, Passover or just a quiet Sunday morning.  There's enough room in the world for all three.