Forecasting Easter
Easter memories
SEONA’S story of her wet laundry and the missing chocolate brought back many Easter memories.
So often have we had wet Easters that I foolishly predicted a cyclone with severe flooding for this Easter.
Fortunately I am worse at forecasting than the meteorologists.
My general recollections of Easter in Fiji over the past 50 years is wet, wet, and more wet.
I remember how one Good Friday we sat in St Luke’s Church at Suva Point for the three hours’ devotion, and having to lift our feet as the flooding water from torrential rain spread further and further into the building, easily distracting us from the holy words being delivered from the pulpit.
Another year my husband was confined in Nadi, while our good friend from the West was obliged to prolong her stay with me, the flooded roads making road travel impossible by either Queens or Kings Rd.
As a child in UK during World War II there were no chocolate eggs so Seona and the chocolaholic dog, Mako would have been disappointed.
Somehow my mother always has a special boiled egg for each of us children on Easter morning.
A real hen’s egg of an exciting colour, red or green but always the usual yellow and white inside.
I also seem to remember fluffy tiny toy yellow chicks with little wire legs that I used to collect from around the house.
My mother always wore a specially decorated hat, so we walked to church in grand style.
She would have easily won the November horse racing decorated hat competition.
She loved to sing the old song, “In her Easter bonnet with all the flowers on it ... .
But one year my youngest sister chose to be born on the Saturday of Easter weekend.
Things were a little different that year.
Every year we children were encouraged to make a miniature Easter garden with mosses for the grass, a model cave with a stone, and a little hill at the other end where we put three little wooden crosses.
Then on Easter morning we covered the garden with brightly coloured spring flowers, having moved the stone aside.
My favourite spring flower was not a flower, but a bud.
The pussywillow had a soft grey furry bud that delighted me.
And I loved the yellow catkins, flowers that hung down from the branches of some trees , the flowers waving gently in the spring breeze.
The church was decorated with bright yellow daffodils and with white arum lillies that were a special symbol of Easter.
On Good Friday, and that day only, we ate fresh baked bread buns with cochineal painted red crosses.
For Easter there was simnel cake which I found very disappointing.
It had no icing but instead it was covered with almond paste, or marzipan which I did not appreciate.
I hope that all The Sunday Times readers had an enjoyable Easter weekend relaxing by the beach or celebrating Easter in the various churches around the country.
TESSA MACKENZIE
Suva