Easter In The Air

Tomorrow is Good Friday.  The kids don't have school.  So today will be sort of like a Friday here.  I can already tell I'm ready for school to be done.  It feels nice to have summer, when the kids can sleep in as long as they want, run around outside all day, not worry about homework.  We have baseball, and this year we start with music lessons.  That's it.  Swimming at Gramma's pool.  Grilling.  Mowing.  I have such a rough life.

Of course, by August I will be eagerly anticipating the beginning of school, but that's then.  This is now.

And Easter is this weekend.  I love Easter.  I love it because it is such a happy holiday.  It symbolizes new beginnings.  It started with the Resurrection, the ultimate New Beginning.  And now it includes Spring, new life outside, warmer weather, later sunsets, lakes thawing, birds singing, coloring eggs, family traditions, mimosas and chocolate.  Ahhhh.  And spring cleaning!

I'm hosting Easter dinner this year.  That's with hubby's side of the family.  My side of the family has Easter brunch, and this year that will be at my brother and SIL1's house.  It will be a full weekend.  I have GOT to clean my embarrassing house.  Saturday we go to Gramma's to dye Easter eggs.  This is a tradition that has been going on since I was a small child.  Every Saturday night before Easter we dye eggs.  We do a LOT of them.  And some of them get pretty extravagant.  The crayons, the steel wool, the paper towels for tie-dying.  I don't know that I've ever gone a year without dying eggs, even if I've done it by myself a couple times.  This year will be a bit bittersweet, since it's the first one without my dad, and he loved doing eggs.  Every year he would only do 2 or 3 for the whole evening, but he'd make an art project out of them. Except for one, which he would simply dye one color after writing "EGG" on it in crayon.  He thought he was so funny.

The Easter bunny still comes Saturday night, and hides eggs all around the house.  The kids will get up in the morning and run around collecting them all, and then have way too much candy before we even get out of the house in the morning.  Then church and off to brother's house, where we have brunch.  Ham and all kinds of brunch-y things.  Bloody Mary's and mimosas.  Yummy.  The kids will have no appetite because of the horrifying amount of chocolate they will have already consumed.

Then we race home to get our own hams in the oven, and do last minute preparations for the 25 or so people that will be descending on us for our Easter Dinner.  Hopefully we will have good weather, because that's what makes Easter here fun.  The kids ride around on the golf cart all evening, people sit around the fire pit, a football gets tossed around.  It's so relaxing.  More food.  Deviled Eggs.  Cupcakes.  Music.  Kids running around yelling, chasing, shooting Nerf darts, hiding, giggling.  Pure joy.

I know exactly what it's going to be like, except for the random hiccups that happen every year (Like when we found out some of the eggs we dyed were never hard-boiled--that was a fun surprise).  And I LOVE the predictability of it.  That's what traditions and family is for.  There's so much comfort in it all.  I think that's mostly why I love holidays so much, why I love having people over at my house.  I feel like all that chaos and noise echoes in my house long after everyone leaves, absorbing into the walls, adding to the happy feeling of my home.