Easter

This year, I celebrated Easter both at school and at home with my roommates. Holidays here are always a bit odd, because you have to decide which traditions from growing up are ones that you want to carry on yourself. Being a teacher adds the additional responsibility of trying to determine which parts of a holiday are essential for your students to know in order for them to understand the purpose and beauty (or craziness) of a holiday.











For me this year, Easter was incredibly hard to decipher. I love Easter, but for me, the beauty of the holiday comes from its Christian/religious meaning. Hiding Easter eggs and eating chocolate bunnies may be fun for small children, but it is also fairly pointless. I thought it was important to teach my kids about the holiday - it is a major American holiday after all - but I did not know how to do it without talking about the Easter Story. If there is one thing that is ingrained into me after years of American education, it is the separation of church and state. I am incredibly squeamish about religious discussion in the classroom, particularly if it is coming from the teacher. Talking about God in a secular classroom feels awkward and unnatural. So I was stuck - wanting to teach the meaning behind Easter, but not wanting to touch on any sensitive subjects (I guess I am not as brave as I act sometimes).










Above: dying Easter eggs
Below: blowing eggs into buckets and recycled pudding containers











I went to ask my co-teachers their opinion, and was amazed to find that they had no idea what Easter was about. All they knew was what the children's English textbooks taught - some rubbish about White House Easter egg rolls (I had never even heard of this tradition before...) and the Easter Bunny. They both told me that they wanted me to teach about the origins of Easter including the Christian story and traditions (after all, if you go back far enough, Easter was a pagan holiday). I guess the way to think about it would be if a teacher wanted to do a cultural lesson on India, so they taught about a Hindi holiday and the different traditions associated with said holiday. In the end, I did what they wanted and taught Easter, including the Easter story. The kids were surprisingly interested... The best part, though, was arts and crafts afterwords. We made blown eggs, dyed Easter eggs, made egg chicks and did several other random activities. It was so entertaining to watch the kids' curiosity when they went to dye eggs. Something which is so natural to me was entirely exotic for them. It was cute.















For Easter at home with the roommates, we went all out with Easter dinner. Kristin and Kaitlyn cooked up awesome American food, Katherine brought over a gorgeous carrot cake and I made my mother's famous Easter bread bunnies! Every Easter Sunday growing up, my mother would wake up at 5am to make these bread bunnies from scratch for us, so that they would be ready before church. They were always one of my favorite things when I was little (that and our coconut lamb cake, but where was I going to find a lamb cake mold in Taiwan?), so I decided it was a tradition I needed to perpetuate here in Kaohsiung.