Tradition – Friend or Foe?

As some of you might have noticed it is Easter. If anybody hasn’t noticed all the indications were there – lots of fluffy yellow things in the shops, little lambs bouncing about in fields and freaky giant Easter Bunnies in the entrance to ASDA.

But the question on many people’s lips is how, in these days of agnosticism, atheism and aardvarkism (as lesser-know but increasingly fashionable branch of observance), is ‘how are we supposed to celebrate Easter?’ Unlike Christmas there seems to be a singular lack of traditional activities such as disastrous gift-buying, food that no one likes, family arguments and debt-creation. In the UK the most popular Easter tradition seems to be trying to poison our children with low-quality, high-quantity, and environmentally-criminally packaged Easter eggs.

Chocolate is freely available in our house (cupboard above the kettle if you are interested) as I believe that chocolate is a good source of iron (especially dark 70% proof chocolate) and thus essential to our diet. Therefore Easter eggs hold little appeal. So, in my family we decided to initiate a different kind of Easter tradition. I have discovered to my cost that family traditions can be a very slippery slope. Once initiated these traditions are hard to dispose of, despite children no longer being children, parents no longer being of sound mind, and Easter never managing to think of a date to be on and stick to it, we still have to have the Easter Treasure Hunt. There is no treasure involved. There certainly is no hunting involved, or at least none of that banned stuff with the red coats. No, the Easter Treasure Hunt is an overly elaborate game played with a multitude of pieces of paper with clues so cryptic that the complier of the Guardian crossword would be confounded. We are confounded. The children are confounded. The resident boyfriend of the child is confounded.

Frankly, I blame the eldest daughter. This tradition-of-confoundedness would never have been invented if it hadn’t been for her. The rest of us were happy to paint inane patterns on eggs, stick fluffy things to coloured paper and throw up chocolate flavoured sick. But not her, she was bored. She required an intellectual challenge akin to proving Fermat’s last theorem or she would simply not enjoy the day. And being the kind and considerate mother that I am I could not bear for my child not to have a good Easter.

So, now, a good fourteen years after The Easter Treasure Hunt was invented, we spend Easter Saturday writing clues and Easter Sunday spreading them around the house and garden, trying to remember what the hell the clues meant and giving even more cryptic hints in order the help with the cryptic clues. As the beloved so rightly pointed out it would frankly be quicker for them to search the house blindfolded for the eventual prizes to this hunt than to solve the clues. But hey – a tradition is a tradition and where would families be without them? (I suggest in the pub having these children buy us drinks would be a good place)