Thinking on the holiday

It’s the end of another Easter Holiday weekend—four days off with two statutory holidays Friday and Monday) and two days with trading bans (Friday and Sunday). And that’s almost all I can say about it.

My mother-in-law was staying with us, then on Sunday a niece and her new baby came up and stayed with Nigel’s sister. We all went over to another niece’s place for afternoon tea, and had a lovely, family time. A little shopping thrown in, some meals, and that’s the short version of this weekend.

Originally, I had many other things I was going to talk about, too. I knew that I’d talked about my dad’s stage management of his Good Friday and Easter Sunday church services (that was back in 2009, it turns out), but I didn’t remember that I’d also mentioned what my mother always said on Easter morning when I was a child; had I not checked old posts, I would have mentioned it this year, so that led me to look at what else I’d already said.

Also in 2009, I mentioned a childhood conflation of Easter and President Lincoln’s assassination. I wasn’t planning on mentioning that again, but I was going to talk about the trading bans in place this weekend. Glad I didn’t.

I first talked about this particular holiday weekend back in 2007, including details about the trading restrictions. Two years later, I said, “Personally, I think if we can’t go three and a half days without buying stuff, then there’s something seriously wrong with us.” Two years later, in 2011, I’d reversed my position:

“Today, for the first time, I began to believe that it may be time to end the trading bans on 3½ days of the year. New Zealand is now a modern country in a different age from when the ban originated, and I’m beginning to think that the trading bans belong in the past, too.”

Last year, I took the middle ground—between my selves, as it were. I think my own differing takes on the same issue shows that I wrestle with the correct answer. This year, for the record, I’m back in favour of ending the bans, but I’m not willing to go to the barricades over it.

What this little stroll through my blog’s archives have shown me is that I’ve talked about Easter as an entity from my past, and the current reality of a secular holiday weekend. I’ve never talked about why it suits me perfectly to have a secular Easter, and, in fact, I almost did this year. I decided, ultimately, that was actually a big topic, and one for another day.

It’s a holiday—I don’t feel like thinking that hard right now.