Easter Sunday
It’s been a slightly crazy day. Miss 13 woke us at 6am this morning, asking if she could get up yet. All she had on her mind was the Easter Bunny, and the prospect of chocolate eggs having been delivered downstairs. This is all my other half’s fault, who has perpetuated the myth since the children were little. We have always had an Easter Egg hunt on Easter Sunday morning, with clues left all over the house and a treasure map to help find the hidden caches of chocolate eggs.
This morning the Easter Bunny magic came to an abrupt end, with a bag of chocolate eggs left on the coffee table in the lounge, and a wonderfully written letter from said Bunny left next to them, explaining that because there are so many children in the world, once everybody in a household reaches 12 years old, they are no longer visited, the job falls upon them to buy treats for each other. The Easter Bunny went on to comment that it was pleasing to see that they had already begun doing this, and to wish them well in the future.
I thought it was a work of genius. Our youngest had been telling me the night before how confident she was in what would happen in the morning – I looked across to my other half and we smiled at each other. There were no sad faces this morning – just excitement at the one day each year when we will let them eat chocolate for breakfast. Of course we then made them wait until we ate roast dinner early this afternoon before they were allowed anything else to eat – which also seemed to work wonderfully.
Lunch was wonderful. Because we often spend weekends standing on the touchline of football or rugby pitches, it’s rare that we have a traditional English roast dinner on a Sunday. Today we set that straight. While my other half peeled carrots, potatoes, chopped up cauliflower, and put chicken in the oven to roast, the rest of us all set about clearing the decks – folding washing, tidying rooms, and so on. The in-laws appeared just before lunch, and of course delivered further chocolate to the children, who smiled like they had put coat-hangers in their mouths.
Roast dinner on a Sunday brings back so many memories of childhood. I would play outside all morning with friends, and then breathlessly arrive in time to sit down to roast potatoes, yorkshire puddings, roast beef, carrots, peas, cauliflower, cabbage – whatever was in season – swamp it all in gravy, and eat until you felt quite poorly. My Mum would also make “poor man’s pickles” – a Yorkshire trait handed down from earlier generation of my Dad’s family – onions sliced thinly into vinegar, which you would haphazardly drop over your roast dinner and eat along with everything else.
If you’re reading this from somewhere else in the world, and have never heard of Yorkshire Puddings, they are just batter poured into a cupcake tin and roasted along with the meat and potatoes – the same kind of batter you might use for toad-in-the-hole. We cheated today and bought ready-made gluten-free yorkshire puddings – everything else was cooked from scratch though. I imagine the remains of the chicken will be picked clean either at supper time tonight, or tomorrow lunchtime for sandwiches.
Tonight is going to be about relaxing. Avoiding doing anything. Kicking back, sitting down, and just “being” – noodling around on the internet, watching the TV, and trying not to think about going back to work on Tuesday.