J and I are “recovered” Christians. We both grew up in fairly religious families, and both remember a time in our lives when we really believed that Jesus was the one-and-only way to eternal salvation. Both of us, however, had left the church by the time we were teens.

This doesn’t stop our respective families from disbelieving us when we state that we are not Christians, and are not raising our daughter as a Christian. They still act like we are just being sulky children who will wise up any minute now and come back into the fold. For the record, we are in our mid 30’s, and it’s not happening.

We have taken to calling ourselves “Cultural Christians” since C was born. This allows for our celebration of the highly commercialized and basically secularized versions of the major Christain holidays, avoiding arkwardnes at family functions and providing an escape from relatives trying to bait us into conversations about our perceived hypocracy: What? You only believe in Jesus when there’s presents involved? (I know, so clever! How do we stand it?)

Still, we try to give C the lowdown on the Christian mythology around the holiday celebration, as well as telling her about the pagan symbolisim and how it got incorporated into the holiday, etc. We tell her these are stories, but that some of her family believes they are true. We are flying blind here, trying to find a way to bring up our child with an open mind and an eye toward letting her decide for herself what she believes – while still giving her enough info about the religion we grew up with (and subsequently ran away from) to innoculate her against the inevitable attempts at indoctrination, however clumsy, that her extended family will make.

Now that C is pushing the grand old age of 6, we thought her big enough to decide if she would like to attend Easter church services, followed by an egg-hunt, with J’s grandmother. Actually, we were both pretty much against the idea, but relented after some consideration of our child’s intelligence and because it seemed like such a small thing that would make his grandma so happy. C said she would like to go, and so we relented.

Today, grandma called and told J that if C was only coming to church so she could go to the egg hunt, well, That Just Wasn’t Right!

To which I just have to say: What the hell?

I mean, isn’t that what all the five-year-olds are there for? And why else would C be going, other than to make grandma happy because she has been asking every year for the last five years?!?! To get the candy, duh!

And if you really want to get into questions of right and wrong, what in the heck is a Christian church doing having an Easter-egg hunt anyway? Isn’t the egg hunt thing a distinctly Pagan tradition, one tied in with the traditional spring fertility rituals?

This whole thing has given me a stabbing pain behind my right eye. And I’m not even sure why I’m posting this at all, except to say that colored eggs and bunny rabbits have nothing to do with Jesus and the resurection and I’m wondering how old I will have to be before the members of my extended family start treating me like an adult. So on that note I will leave you with my favorite Easter joke:

Why does the Easter Bunny hide his eggs?

He doesn’t want anyone to know he’s been fucking chickens.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)