There are several things about
being in New Zealand at Easter time that interest me, quite apart from the
dizzying sensation of celebrating a holiday of rebirth in autumn when the light
is leaving and leaves are falling. Take, for example, the cult of the hot cross
bun, which used to be available for a short time each year close to the Easter
holidays. People would greet their appearance with the same inexplicable delight
they display for Christmas fruitcake.
As the Kiwis have become more
American in their capitalism, with shops staying open in the evenings and on the
weekends they've also learned how to market the heck out of their holiday
specialties. Just like in America, where candy companies start to sell us
Halloween candy in September, you can now get hot cross buns weeks before Easter
here. Unlike in the US, where we fool ourselves into believing that we will
store that bag o' Snickers in the pantry for a month and half until the little
monsters come calling, you really can't tell yourself that the hot cross buns
you buy at the beginning of March are going to be greeting the Easter Bunny on
the holiday table.
Another Easter tradition here is
the closure of schools, government services, and many businesses on Good Friday.
When NZ was a British colony and mostly C of E, Good Friday being a national
holiday made sense in a religious way. But NZ stopped being a homogenous land of
immigrants from the UK years ago, and is now home to large numbers of residents
who came not from England or Scotland or Ireland, not from Europe even, but from
Africa and Asia and the wide Polynesian seas. The growing diversity of its
population hasn't affected the nation's tradition of closing down shop on Good
Friday. And those closures are repeated on something called Easter Monday, whose
religious significance none of my friends here could explain. Schools put the
cross on the bun, so to speak, by extending the closure through Tuesday,
because, really, one might as well.
If having the day off thanks to
someone else's religion wasn't a good enough reason to look forward to Good
Friday, I could learn to love celebrating the day if I could get invited to my
friend Louise's every year, where her scones topped with jam and whipped cream
appear on the table next to a tower of her daughter's hot cross buns.
Carbohydrates, fat, and sugar. Now that's the way to celebrate a holiday, even
if no one can really explain why.
