Lost in transit

Easter in Austria

I'm not saying everyone in Austria celebrates Easter exactly like this. Being a bicultural (?) family, we improvise sometimes.

1. Long weekend. The children got, I think, a week and a half off from school. They go back to school tomorrow, which is Wednesday. I got Good Friday off, and yesterday, the Monday following Easter. Getting Friday off is, I have been told, not automatic in Austria, although Monday is a legal holiday.
2. Decorating the Easter tree. This involves placing cherry and pussy willow twigs in a vase and decorating them with decorated Easter eggs (hollow) and other Easter-theme decorations. This appears to be common here.
3. No church bells. Church bells fly to Rome prior to Easter, and return Easter day to ring in the holiday. During their absence, groups of (authorized) children walk around the village making a racket (at the times the bells would normally ring) with wooden rachets and at the top of their lungs chanting something we have not yet deciphered.
4. Building the Easter house. This works like this: the youngest child in the family (almost 9, in our case) says, "I'm sick of this crazy family. I want to move out. I want a house of my own in the back yard," whereupon the father and mother drive around to hardware chains and garden stores looking for a suitable garden shed. After picking one out (2x2.5 meters), the father builds it in the back yard. First he has to make a foundation, which requires removal of a tree and several bushes, and much flattening, and piling up of stones and gravel, and trips to the hardware chain for large blocks of concrete for footings and foundation bits, and this is a bit comical since he has only a small car now. Then the house is assembled, which turns out to be the easy part. The child is invited up onto the roof to help nail down the tar paper, which she turns out to enjoy greatly and carries out with dedication, concentration and skill.
5. Redundant deception of children. This includes threats that "the Easter bunny will/won't do/bring/like" something if the children do/don't do something, and blurting out statements like, "did you just see that large bunny over there? I wonder if it was the Easter bunny," while driving; and secret shopping for Easter supplies such as eggs, dyes, decorations and gifts; and pit-stop/Mission Impossible-style boiling and decoration of eggs when the youngest is finally out of the house with a friend for an hour or so, and midnight basket filling and hiding; despite the fact that the youngest has said, quite clearly, "Dad, I know who the Easter bunny really is: you and mom," and the second fact that her 16-year old sister has probably also figured it out.
6. Contracting laryngitis. This happens to fathers when they build garden houses in the rain, despite already having a cold, because wouldn't it be neat to have the house finished before the weekend is over? So one spends Easter weekend sounding like the offspring of Tom Waits and Margot Kidder, croaking things like, "gee, it sure is funny, the less voice I have the more I want to say things."
7. Fantasizing that the rest of the population has succumbed to a catastrophe of some sort. Because the streets are so empty, but for gangs of rachet-wielding chanting children, since everyone else is away on holidays, out of town to one place or another. You go to the movies, twice, once with the kids and once with grown friends who happen to be doctors or music teachers, because somehow most of your friends are either doctors or music teachers while you are the odd one out, the cello student, and patient.
8. House cleaning. Because youngest daughter's room is just way too dusty. When you start, you figure it can't take more than an hour for you and your wife to straighten it out. She has more thorough plans, and it takes all day. But looks real nice afterwards. Then, before bed, you polish all the shoes in the house, because you are keeping some and donating others to charity (a whole large black garbage bag full, as it turns out) and you can't give away unpolished shoes.
9. Skipping church. This was the first time we did this. We were just too tired. Maybe from housecleaning, maybe from making Easter baskets at midnight, maybe from getting up at 4 AM to hide them in the yard before the kids got up, just in case. Which turned out to be the right thing to do, because they woke up around 6 and gathered their eggs.
10. Half day in Vienna. Very few people do this, I think, because Vienna was like a ghost town yesterday. We went to an okay painting exhibition and then browsed in the gift shop for a while, where I saw some neat Lomo cameras, which I may try out someday soon, because they seem low-tech enough for me. Gamma we gave a choice between a wiggly eraser thing, a multi-colored pencil thing, or a spinning top thing that draws as it spins, with what I thought were colored pencils but which turned out to be some sort of indelible brightly-colored felt pens. After the exhibition, you go to an Asian fusion place for lunch, where they have installed spiffy white-leather sofas along the walls of which they are quite proud, since they are mentioned in the menues. The father orders bulgogi, the mother some lemon grass chicken, and the youngest child orders fried noodles. The oldest daughter eats somewhere else with a boy from school. When lunch is finished, the father turns over the daughter's paper placemat and says, "let's give your new top a spin." The girl spins it a little and it makes a few squiggles. The mother spins it carefully and it makes a few squiggles. The father gives it a powerful spin and it makes a lot more squiggles, clear across the table and about a meter along the white leather sofa before coming to rest in a crack. Automatically, the youngest daughter spreads out her coat, concealing the indelible squiggles and when the waiter comes to collect payment for the check, she waits until he is out of eyeshot before gathering her coat and leaving with her parents, leaving her father simultaneously grateful for and concerned about her larcenous heart. She uses the moment to ask for an ice cream cone, which she is not denied.

And how was your Easter?