Easter

It often interests me to think about how people feel about Easter. Obviously, for many it is an important religious festival and will be observed as such – my father, for example, will be going to church on Easter Sunday as he always does. Equally, it is one of those rare times in the year when families can get together as they do at Christmas, only this time, if they are lucky, the weather will be better than it is in December. For me, raised as I was in a mixed religious household, it has always been a festival tinged a little bit with guilt, largely because it falls around the same time as Passover (Pesach), when we are meant to eat matzah (unleavened bread) for 8 days, which sometimes gets in the way of my love for hot cross buns. I never can resist a good hot cross bun. Obviously, this is ridiculous as I am hardly a keen religious observer at any time of the year, so there is no reason to feel bad for eating matzah for breakfast and hot cross buns for tea, but there it is.

As it happens, as far as I am concerned, Easter is mostly about the food. Leaving aside hot cross buns, there is the chocolate. I have been to the excellent chocolate factory shop in Millers Walk in Fakenham today which is stuffed to the ceiling with cheap chocolate. At the same time, I miss the wonderful chocolatiers in Dieppe where we spent Easter for nearly 30 years with my late father-in-law. They had the best window displays at this time of year, for sure. For at least 20 years I have made Nigella Lawson’s Easter Egg Nest Cake for Easter Sunday – a crazily rich chocolate cake, topped with mini-eggs and I strongly recommend it, although we have had some diversions to Simnel cake in more recent years. I think we eat our entire year’s ration of lamb at this time of year as it is traditional to eat a lamb dish at Passover and I do a mean slow cooked shoulder of lamb on Easter Sunday.

This year, for the first time, however, I have realised that the gathering of family might be becoming more important to me even than chocolate. This will be our first Easter without my mum and so I have felt more gratitude than I might otherwise have done that my children have decided to spend their university holidays at home for these two weeks. They are both immersed in university work as it happens so I only see them in the evenings, but that is absolutely fine by me. It means cosy evenings watching movies and knitting peacefully and I love it. They are too old for Easter Egg hunts in the garden, but may benefit from my foray into the chocolate shop if they are lucky.

The shop is not closed for Easter. I have been open all day today (Good Friday) and will be open again tomorrow, but closed as usual on Monday when I fully intend to catch up on the weeding. I have enjoyed meeting visitors to Norfolk today, some of whom came out of their way to visit us. It is lovely to feel even a small part of someone else’s Easter. I hope that you all have a wonderful Easter weekend and that you find some time in it for knitting or crochet! If you are looking for a vaguely Easter themed knit, look no further than the Emotional Support Chicken which I was busy knitting this time last year.