Easter. Sunday.

Sundays (except when we have theater tickets) are frequently easy days for Muri and I … lunch and a trip to the park or to Mother’s Beach in Dana Point to sit in our camp chairs and read.   But it’s Easter Sunday today.   Yorba Linda Regional Park is not my park on Easter … it belongs to the large families who congregate there for Easter celebrations.   I’ve been in Socal for so long that I don’t know if this is a tradition elsewhere in the country but here, every strip of public land large enough to be called a park is packed to overflowing.   So, as non-Christians, Easter Sunday is a what-shall-we-do day for us.  By the way, I won’t be in my park tomorrow, either because the large families of Easter celebrants leave such a mess that it infuriates me too much to be there.   Sorry to be curmudgeonly … I know how important this day is for Christians.

Charoset and Chocolate Eggs

Last night was the first night of Passover, known as Pesach to Jews, which celebrates the exodus of the Jews from slavery in Egypt.  Passover is traditionally celebrated with a Seder, a ritualized dinner of specific foods symbolizing the Exodus and the reading from a haggadah, that tells the story of Exodus and explains some of the traditions.  For example, according to Judaism 101, matzo commemorates the fact that the Jews leaving Egypt were in a hurry, and did not have time to let their bread rise. It is also a symbolic way of removing the “puffiness” (arrogance, pride) from our souls.  Some symbolic foods are arranged on a Seder plate and used during the dinner as part of certain rituals.  Two of these are charoset, a mix of chopped apples, walnuts, sweet wine and cinnamon, and bitter herb, or horseradish.  Charoset symbolizes the mortar used by the Jews to build during their slavery and bitter herb represents the bitterness of enslavement.