As a young girl growing up in Brooklyn, New York, I always got new clothes for Easter. The night before, I bathed and shampooed. Mom wrapped my long brown hair around strips of cloth to make corkscrew curls a la Shirley Temple.
On Easter morning, everything I put on, from my clean skin out, was new…underwear, socks, shoes, dress, coat and hat. I never gave much thought to why…we just did this every year. Since I attended Catholic school, we children had to go to nine o’clock mass. The church flickered and shone from the scores of lighted candles. All of us looked so fresh and sparkling in our new clothes and we sang the Easter hymns with gusto. Alleluia, Alleluia.
After church my family engaged in hunting for Easter goodies. Mom gave me an empty basket with green mossy stuff and I filled it with the colored eggs, jelly beans, yellow marshmallow chicks and chocolate bunnies I gathered from their hiding places in our apartment.
“Don’t eat any until after dinner, or you’ll spoil your appetite,” Mom warned.
“Aw Mom, pleeease.”
“Okay, but just one.”
Of course, one is never enough. I ate as many as I could without getting caught.
We had dinner at one o’clock. The aroma of baked ham with sweet pineapple, cloves and brown sugar glaze filled the apartment. The bone and leftover meat would make a hearty pea soup later in the week. Mom covered the dining room table with a lace tablecloth and used her good china and silverware for the occasion. A bowl of colored hard-boiled eggs sat in the center of the table. Linen napkins replaced our usual paper ones and Mom tucked one under my chin to protect my Easter finery.
After dinner, Dad retired to his easy chair in the living room, picked his teeth and listened to a ball game on the radio while Mom and my sister Dottie cleared the table and cleaned the kitchen. My brother Andy had to empty garbage, tote plates from dining room to kitchen and dry the washed dishes. I put them away until Mom shooed me from the small kitchen.
“Can I go out and play?” I begged.
“Okay, but no roughhousing in your new clothes.”
None of the other kids could play as we usually did either…we all had our best outfits on. So, we stood around eating candy and talking about what we planned to do the coming week off from school. We played some mild games like guess the actor or actress from their initials or a spelling game called “hangman”- a pre-TV form of “Wheel of Fortune.”
For supper we ate cold ham and cheese sandwiches slathered with Gulden’s mustard. Mom always bought potato salad from the German deli and she added a couple of chopped eggs. Some food coloring had seeped through cracks in the shells onto the whites; it looked like confetti in the potato salad. Sliced tomatoes served with mayo completed the meal. Before supper, we finally got out of our new clothes and into something more comfortable.
As I now think back to those pristine Easter outfits, I realize that part of the reason for them had to do with reaffirmation of the continuance of life. Just as Easter mornings saw green buds peek out from the barren branches of winter-weary trees, we also felt renewed both physically and spiritually.
