This afternoon I had the privilege of reading a set of "Night Writes" from a 4th grade class who has been busily preparing for their TAKS Writing Test in the spring. Their assignment was to write about a time when they found something. One of them, in particular, had me from the get-go:
"Me, my dad and my bro were on our way to the graveyard for the Easter egg hunt."
Now, I don't know about you, but when I used to go to our community Easter egg hunts as a young child, we tore through the grass behind the fire station where it was held. While there happened to be a graveyard a little ways down the street, we never entered it. Whose idea was it for this person to hold a cute little Easter egg hunt in a GRAVEYARD? The piece goes on to describe his heroics in defending the honor of some little kid who was being made fun of by a group of older kids. After the writer describes getting punched, he wrapped it up by telling us that, "It hurt so bad that I felt like a woman who just gave birth."
Kids say the darnedest things, I tell ya.
This essay got me thinking. Did I have some holiday tradition that might appear weird to an outsider? Something akin to hunting Easter eggs in a graveyard? I can remember a plethora of holiday traditions from my childhood, but nothing anywhere near as strange as what he described. How about you?
When I was a child we lived in Upstate New York where it rained or snowed 300 days in a year. For Easter my parents would hide the eggs inside the house, and one year after not finding one of the eggs we had to wait until it started to smell to find it. After that my mom started writing down where she hid the eggs. When we moved to NC, our new Southern neighbors thought we were crazy when we said we hid the eggs inside!
ReplyDeleteOK, that story isn't too strange, not graveyard strange, but the Southerners we shocked with our behavior thought we were graveyard strange!
And we spoke funny. And drank instant "iced tea". And our barbeque consisted of hunks of meat with sauce on it instead of chopped meat with weird vinegar sauce.
We were strange indeed!