Chocolate Eggs and Easter Bunnies

When I was growing up the Berenstain Bears had an Easter special in which stereotypical male-doofus Papa Bear tells the cubs, via cartoon montage, that Easter is all about "CHO-colate eggs and EA-ster bunnies," only to be corrected by always-right Mama Bear's montage about nice secular Easter things like love, family, and loving your family. It was an irony not lost on us kids that this corrected version of Easter still had nothing to do with the crowning glory of Christian belief, nor do I now miss the irony that we have inherited many of our Easter traditions from the pagans and have only mildly Christianized some of them.

Well, it's not particularly easy to capture the true meaning of Easter on film, as much of what makes the holiday special to me is either defined by absence (the empty tomb) or is too big to do justice through imagery. This post is therefore something of an apology for the fact that What Easter Means to Me and What My Easter Pictures Look Like are two very different things. If I had a recording I could play for you a beautiful song we sang for our Easter services, taken from those wonderful lines in Isaiah:

Surely He hath borne our griefs
And carried all our sorrows
Surely He hath borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows

He was wounded for all our sin
Bruised by all our iniquity
And with His stripes we all are healed
We are healed

We are healed.

I don't have a recording of that simple, profoundly moving song, but I do have pictures of kids looking for chocolate eggs and Easter bunnies, so here they come: