Nikki Yeager

I've been waiting for Easter for about a month now. Why? Because that little Christian holiday with the big personified bunny and the oddly colored eggs is as foreign to my boyfriend as Borsch is to me. He's never celebrated an Easter, never dyed an egg and never heard "Peter Cottontail" or a church hymn.

In fact, he's completely confused about the whole ordeal about eating chocolate rabbit shaped candies in order to celebrate a savior rising from the dead.

Which is understandable if you really sit down and think about it. 

That being said, I dragged him to my Aunt and Uncle's house for his very first Easter experience complete with baskets, eggs, chocolate and plastic-grass-basket-filling... all the makings of a real holiday!

.......

First on the list of activities when we got up to my Aunt's house was Easter egg dyeing. So I grabbed some vinegar, dye and boiling water from my Aunt and led the procession of relatives to the dining room. As I mixed colors together for the perfect dye-to-water ration, my cousins and their significant others stood around me paying a little too much attention to my every move.

With everything set I gave the OK and stood back, ready for a stampede of dyers.

Except for the fact that no one moved.

So I waited.

And so did everyone else.

Finally I broke the silence: "So who wants to go first?"

Daniel spoke up with a helpless puppy expression on his face: "Ummm... how does this work?"

And everyone leaned forward a little for my reply.

Me: Brushing it off as him being strangely uninformed, "hehehehe, this is his first Easter!!!"

Five other husbands-of-cousins chimed in at once, almost jumping at the opening, "Me too!"

And there I was, having Easter with 10 Jews who have never done Easter before.

Which is probably one of the more ridiculous situations to find oneself in. So me and my cousin broke down the situation for everyone and gave a fabulous egg dyeing information session.

And later that day we sat at our festive dinner table with our painstakingly colored eggs, Turkey, pasta salad....
And matzo on the side (in honor of Passover, of course!).