When I was a child, my family celebrated Christian holidays in a fairly standard secular way, decorating a tree on Christmas and hunting eggs on Easter, not to mention joining in the customary consumption of marshmallow peeps, “jelly bird eggs” (whatever those are), and other foods invented by companies with a clever eye for turning a profit from a holiday.

My version of Easter lacks the radical Christian religiosity that Nichola laid out in her recent post about Good Friday as a time “to look at the crucifixions necessary to preserve the fiction of Pax Americana, or any false peace maintained by force, whether violent or hegemonic.” It lacks the progressive rethinking of the resurrection narrative that Rabbi Lerner highlighted in his spiritual wisdom of the week post with a quotation from Peter Rollins. But it’s still one of my favorite holidays of the year.

On its surface, the humanist Easter I grew up with may have seemed drained of meaning to religious onlookers, but it was actually highly ritualized and deep in its own way. I want to share my family’s three main rituals — an Easter eve afternoon of collaborative egg art, the collective reading aloud of a surprisingly feminist bunny book from the 1930s, and a morning of romping, outdoor egg hunts in bitter spring weather — as a resource for nonreligious families who want to celebrate a secular Easter that’s about more than just candy.

An Afternoon of Egg Art

There’s something deeply nourishing about spending hours making art in a group. The air becomes quiet, contemplative, and open. The contemplative air that settles over a group of people making art invites earnest, emotionally grounded communication. It creates a non-awkward silence — something hard to come by in our society. Creating art on something as fragile as an egg requires total concentration. One slip of the hand can (and does) smash half an hour’s work, so creating art on eggs can also offer practice in letting go. As a small child I dyed eggs by dipping them in edible dyes and using rubber-band-resist techniques. I’ve continued to keep up this tradition as an adult. Here are some eggs I dyed with friends in 2007:

In middle school I began experimenting with Ukrainian egg dyeing techniques, which involves melting beeswax over a candle, drawing patterns on eggs, and then dipping them into successive baths of brilliant (but somewhat toxic and non-edible) dyes. My friends and I spent hours dyeing the eggs and then holding them up to a candle flame afterward to melt off the wax and reveal the bright patterns.

A few years ago, my partner taught me yet another egg-dyeing technique involving drizzles of rubber cement and Ukrainian egg dyes. That’s how we spent yesterday afternoon (the picture at the top of the post is of the eggs we made). Here’s a process picture:

A Surprisingly Feminist Bunny Book

The most central Easter tradition throughout my childhood was the ritualized reading aloud of “The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes” a children’s book written in 1939 by Du Bose Heyward (who I just realized is also the author of the novel “Porgy” on which Gershwin’s opera was based) and illustrated by Marjorie Flack.

Just as “Porgy” has its heart in the right place but is far from a shining exemplar of anti-racist literature, “The Country Bunny” has a nice grrl-power punch but is by no means the best example of feminist literature around these days. However, I still love this book deeply and think it’s pretty progressive, more than seventy years after it was written.

Here’s the short version of the story: a young, brown cottontail girl bunny with funny country clothes announces her desire someday to become one of the world’s five Easter bunnies (an exalted position with great prestige and responsibility). All of the “big white bunnies who lived in fine houses” and the big masculine Jack rabbits laugh at her and tell her to “go back to the country and eat a carrot” and leave important labor like Easter egg delivery to big men bunnies like them. In the face of their sneering prejudice, the country bunny just says “you wait and see.”

The country bunny grows up but has to put her career aspirations on hold temporarily because one day, “much to her surprise,” she has twenty-one baby bunnies. (There is no mention ever of a husband or father bunny, so it seems like she was just enjoying the pleasure of being a mature woman rabbit but did not have access to comprehensive sex ed information or contraception …)

However, as a single mother and the manager of her family farm, the country bunny eventually gains recognition from the rabbit community for her wisdom, kindness, cleverness, and swift feet, and breaks through the glass ceiling to become the first female Easter bunny. Can you see why my four-year-old feminist heart was pounding a little? The story doesn’t end there, though … you’ll have to read the book for the whole tale.

A Muddy Romp Outdoors

The last ritual of my humanist Easter involves a morning of egg hunts, hiding the eggs we dyed the day before in the roots and branches of trees, or nestled in the grass. My parents used to invite over a big group of international students for Easter dinner, so egg hunts at my house were an opportunity for all of us to reach past our linguistic and cultural barriers and have some good fun outdoors. But most importantly, the egg hunts were a ritualized yearly time when we opened ourselves up to the frosty, muddy reality of early Wisconsin spring. I think Easter was often the first day that I really braved the cold long enough to notice how plants were actually starting to grow after the bitter winter. What a thrill to see the first crinkled rhubarb shoots starting to poke through the ground, or the tulips’ sharp green tips. Especially in colder climates, extended outdoor egg hunts offer an opportunity to meditate on the radical amazement of springtime, just as the earth starts to thaw.