hot cross carbs

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. 

And just when I was recovering from my second helping of whipped cream and scones, it was time to set another table for Easter at my friend Yoke's. So if you're wondering how you improve on scones and cream (and hot cross buns, if that's your passion)...just add cheese, salami, ham, and chocolate. Lots and lots of chocolate, as if the Easter Bunny suddenly decided he was done with this house-to-house delivery nonsense,  dropped his whole chocolate inventory into Yoke's kitchen, and hopped away to rest up for whatever the heck happens on Easter Monday.  Perhaps the purpose of Easter Monday is to flagellate ourselves with carrot sticks to atone for our festive dining sins.