Easter For The Churchless Baby

An ex-Catholic tries to untangle the candy and eggs from the religious tradition

Google “vintage Easter photos” and you’ll find yourself down a creepy internet rabbit hole in an almost literal sense. Whoever came up with the concept of having children dress up in church clothes and pose with adult men dressed as anthropomorphic rabbits had a dark sense of humor or a macabre sense of fun. Almost all of the photos available online look as though they were taken at the very moment the children became aware of their own mortality. In a time-flaying flash of supernatural prescience, they understand that one day in the future, long after the only relics that remain of their childhood are trinkets at garage sales and Goodwills and garbage dumps, strangers will look at those photos and think, that kid is not having a good time.

The problem is that it’s not possible for an adult man to dress like a bunny without ghoulish effect. Large Disney character-style costumes don’t assuage the creepiness. Masks with headpieces don’t work. Neither does face paint with an eared headdress. The problem is the ears themselves. Adult men cannot wear rabbit ears and have it look okay. Maybe this could have been solved long ago by allowing women to fill the role of Easter Rabbit for family photographic purposes– Petra Rabbit rather than Peter Rabbit, if you will– but I guess the gender of the imaginary rabbit was so important that adherence to the gender within the mythology was worth the cost of whatever lingering rabbit-related trauma the kids in the old photos suffered. Suburban American culture is artificial and strange.

I’ve been thinking about adult men and their man-sweat stuffed into rabbit costumes posing with confused children because we’ve been thinking about having Juniper’s photos taken with the Easter Bunny the biggest, mall-iest mall within a fifteen minute drive of our house. Despite all of the things I just pointed out, sometimes the photos of kids with men dressed as bunnies turn out pretty funny. And we have no My First Christmas photos with Juniper because we’d just moved and she was so small that getting her out of the house was still an ordeal.

Now, at five months old, she’s a different baby than she was as a cantankerous newborn. She loves getting out of the house. She loves loud, colorful environments. I took her out with me to the Glendale Americana and she spent the whole time strapped to my chest in her Baby Bjorn squealing with delight at random Armenian families, and when we got home, she took a long happy nap. Why not seize this opportunity to get her dressed up and yell baby nonsense at a bunny man? It combines everything she loves– strangers, bright colors, a car ride, and chaos!

“Are we raising Juniper with Easter?” I asked Josh the other week. It felt odd to me to reduce the most important event on the Christian calendar to a candy and weird-men-in-costumes spectacle, but we're not even getting our daughter baptized or raising her in a church of any kind. (She can make up her own mind about religion when she's older, if that's what she wants.) But what's Easter without the Jesus of it all?

“Yes. Egg hunts.” he responded.

“But we’re not taking her to church.”

“No.”

I’ve never done Easter without God before.

My paternal grandmother was bullied out of high school in part because she was Catholic in a region of the country where the Protestant majority were sometimes assholes to the Catholic minority. When I was a teenager, Catholicism was presented to me as an act of resistance and resilience.

I was raised with Easter coming at the end of Lent, a season that kicked off with children being told “Remember man, that you are dust and to dust you shall return” as a priest smudged black on our foreheads (which I thought looked rad as hell), a season where I dutifully picked little bones out of pan-fried frozen sunfish on Fridays and thought longingly of pepperoni pizza because those were the rules. A season that started in the gloomy unending winter of northern Wisconsin and ended in the muddy promise of something vaguely springlike. A season capped by a family viewing of The Ten Commandments starring Charleton Heston playing Moses, a Jew, and Anne Baxter playing a very horny Nefertari (I always had to go to bed before Charleton turned the Nile to blood). A season where we were told the graphic story of a 33-year-old’s torture and death so many times that it wasn’t until I saw The Passion of the Christ with my (horrified) Jain then-boyfriend in college that I realized how weird it was that I’d been learning about that whole ordeal since I was a child. (Maybe that’s why I’m such a big Last Podcast on the Left fan now--Jesus’ crucifixion groomed me to love true crime.)

I chose to get confirmed as a teenager despite my reticence over the Church’s attitude toward women and family planning; it was a symbolic gesture that would mean a lot to my grandparents. I even chose to attend a Catholic university, where I sang complicated Latin songs about sin in the liturgical choir.

I found Lent to be a useful season of self-discipline and sacrifice when, a worthwhile time period of mindful restraint– a neurologist would call it a built-in annual dopamine fast. One of my favorite memories from college was returning to the music building with the liturgical choir late night after Easter Vigil mass at the basilica, our voices sore from a week of litanies of saints and stations of the cross and absurd descants, and find an array of post-Lenten candy and sweets presented like Jesus himself appearing triumphantly resurrected in Galilee. After forty days without even as much as a nip of candy, I ate an entire chocolate rabbit from the ears down. Remember man that you’re dust, and to a self-induced sugar coma you shall return.

But once my world grew beyond my childhood and college campus, the Church wasn’t a religion of my grandmother’s resilience, it was an organization of moral failings. I abandoned both the church and my belief in God entirely when I faced how bad the organization was as a social force. If the "celibate men say birth control is murder" canard didn't get to me, it was sex abuse scandal after sex abuse scandal that finally pushed me out forever.

I left the Church behind, and Easter with it. (Here I should make it clear that I still love many people who attend Catholic mass and find personal comfort in their Catholic faith without making their faith an excuse to attack other people’s rights; personal religious faith that hurts nobody else is your own business. It’s the Church itself as an organization that chased me away-- although Pope Francis seems kind of cool from a distance, but not cool enough for me to entertain returning.)

Many parents my age can relate. According to Pew, only 21% of younger millennials say they are fairly or absolutely certain that God exists; about 30% of older millennials feel the same. Every generation of Americans has gotten less religious from the midpoint of the twentieth century on; the number of self-identified agnostics and atheists in Gen Z is larger than any generation that came before them. Barring an obvious god appearing and giving humanity an undeniable sign and clear instructions, US kids in Juniper’s generation will be the least religious ever, only to be surpassed by the generation that comes after them. I'm not the only one trying to figure out how to do Easter that isn't centered on a deeply held belief in God's son's resurrection.

Maybe in that spirit, given how the religious tradition of Easter looks from a distance, getting a baby dressed up and photographed with a full-grown man dressed as a rabbit isn’t all that weird. It's no weirder than two agnostic parents taking a child to mass, or attempting to instill the notion of the Trinity to her, or feeding her a McDonald's Fillet O Fish on Fridays. It's all strange, miraculous, or bizarre, depending on your perspective from inside or outside of faith. When she's older, we'll explain what religious people believe about Easter and try to explain what it all has to do with man-sized rabbits and artificial pastel grass (still not sure?), but for now, egg hunts and Peeps are fine.

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