‘Kook-ka-kee-koo’, and other ways of celebrating Easter
Posted 9 April 2009 // Carl Walrond
Not the Easter bunny – Alexandra's Easter Bunny Hunt
It is a strange time of year.
It varies when it falls according to calculations that escape me (it’s got something to do with the moon). Sometimes it’s in March, sometimes in April.
For most people it means an extra long weekend. For Christians it obviously has religious meaning. Yet not everyone is religious, nor Christian. Chinese New Zealanders use Easter as a time to hold a sports tournament. Trampers head into the hills before the snows come. In the past you could take a cheap rail holiday. For children it is about chocolate eggs. For Central Otago hunters it is about bunnies, and hunters everywhere will be taking part in the roar. And these Island-Bay types for some reason raced pancakes in 1985.
It definitely marks the end of the golden weather – it is autumn. There’s just Queen’s Birthday in early June – after which it truly is the winter of our discontent, as the next public holiday is Labour Day in spring.
During my coffee break, I learned that the four of us gasbagging were all going home for Easter weekend. Emily is off to the Hawke’s Bay, Emma to Wanganui (or Whanganui) and Julia to the City of the Future (Hamilton). It’s truly the return of the prodigal daughters.
Me, I’m taking the family off to Auckland to my olds. If Easter has a commonality, it’s that, like Christmas, it is a time to go home. My mother has promised to walk around the garden crowing ‘kook-ka-kee-koo, kook-ka-kee-koo’ while hiding Easter eggs for her grandchildren. My role, should it need explaining, is to tell the small ones that the Easter cockerell is out and about.
My only Easter Tradition now is trying NOT to eat chocolate eggs. Those little creme egg stalls have popped up at the super market; I want to buy a dozen. Maybe that’s why the trampers go tramping … to avoid the temptation.
Some people love their creme eggs so much they pimp them http://www.pimpthatsnack.com/snackabase/cremeegg/21.
When I was little, we’d go to Easter Camp at El Rancho. My mother would give me one marshmallow egg - I don’t really like marshmallow eggs.
But then my friend started coming to Easter Camp too, and her mother would make us both an Easter pack, filled with a cornucopia of chocolate and candy Easter delights. We’d try to make the creme eggs last as long as possible. They’d get very sticky.
Sitting on my bum, eating pancakes, French toast and gorging on chocolate is the plan for the day
Chocolate midnight feasts! Why does food taste best with candles and without grown-ups?
My best friend from kindergarten was Dutch and had her birthday around now. When her birthday fell at Easter, her parents used to include an Easter egg hunt at the party. Thing is, I went to about six of these birthdays, and they always hid the eggs in the same places. Score!
As well as the chocolate, I look forward to Easter because it signals the end of the D.I.Y. season. One can now legitimately put those paint pots, easycrete bags, and lawn seed packets back in the shed on the basis that no paint can dry, concrete set, or grass grow over winter. All those jobs you said would be completed last Christmas, and then definitely by Easter, can now be given Labour Weekend deadlines!