Holiday times have changed round these parts, and Easter is no different. Years ago, there was almost forced attendance at sunrise services on cold New Jersey mornings. I sang in the church choir, as did my sister, half awake and hardly likely to remember the words to five or six standard hyms. Pre-dawn fellowship was both strikingly beautiful as well as surreal, what with celebrating the resurrection next to a bustling Morris County highway, bread trucks leaving diesel fumes in their wake. I’m quite sure my family had traditional fare afterward, breakfast or brunch of some sort, including large bagels you can’t find outside the tri-state area and mimosas made with a family preferred spumante. There was likely a good bit of fighting, origins at this point unknown or successfully blocked from adult memory, and equal parts laughter. Then sleep. Or maybe stifled irritation that you cooked eggs and had to do the dishes. Or maybe a movie, just the four of us.

My father is gone and my sister is living in California for a bit. That leaves me and mom and the urban family that she, not I, has created. It’s one she continues to modify on a regular basis, based on who doesn’t have a family for a particular holiday. I love this about her, her attentiveness in friendships and a level of caring that prompts her to do more than send a Hallmark. It’s been a truly delightful evolution, actually, this transition from “just us” to a larger table, one that might require place cards, or at the very least me rehearsing the newcomer’s name repeatedly prior to our reservation time. This switch imposes a new structure on our holidays, forces us to exchange niceties rather than barbs. I like it. Today we’ll indulge in both cheese and chocolate fondue, a terribly traditional Protestant way to celebrate the resurrection, and one of my mother’s friends will join us.

Trust that, like normal folk, we’ll pull out our elasticized waistbands and laugh at abomidable Easter hats, not to mention the children who don’t seem bright enough to find that magenta egg right in front of them. It is a holiday, after all, and there is much to be celebrated.

Happy Easter.