Dialogue: Rice wine for the Easter bunny

By DIANA WITCHTEL

Easter is upon us and thoughts turn to spring, the first crocuses popping up through winter's last snow. Sorry. That was when I lived in Canada and holidays made some sort of seasonal sense.

Never mind. I like Easter, even upside down, and despite the tedious debate about whether, in a secular society, largely irrelevant religious holidays should be allowed to interfere with our inalienable right to hit the mall.

Even I don't need to shop 365 days a year. So it's good to see that Parliament has voted to leave the few remaining genuine holidays alone.

How much choice would low-paid workers really have had about whether they spent Christmas Day and Easter Sunday toiling for people with Act-sized incomes?

And who says our holidays and rituals must have religious content to be of value?

DIY family rituals are currently very hot on Oprah and mad parenting websites, though setting aside a day to honour your pet is going too far. Walking around behind mine scooping up his offerings in a plastic bag is honouring him quite enough for me.

I tend to take an eclectic approach to tradition, possibly as a result of growing up with an atheist Jewish father and a sometime Catholic mother. We did Easter and Christmas. We also went to the odd bar mitzvah and my mother would produce a sort of Kiwi kosher dinner at Passover. Well, it worked for us.

Our current household has developed its own comforting, if largely meaningless, rituals.

Nothing gets my partner out of bed in the morning if he doesn't have to. Yet each year he sneaks out at dawn to play Easter bunny and hide eggs in places where, no doubt, the pets have just relieved themselves. (A true pagan at heart, he would also dance around the garden dressed in nothing but woad if the children let him.) The grown-up boys are no longer keen on this compulsory dawn parade. They're usually recovering from tribal rituals of their own. But, tradition being an elastic notion, at least at our house, their groggy truculence has just become part of the family fun.

As with many seasonal festivities, there is a cleansing element of suffering involved. Each Easter brings a dilemma. Should we take an obscene amount of money, put it in a pile and set fire to it (possibly while dancing around wearing woad)? Or should we take the only slightly more insane option and go to the Easter Show? In an annual triumph of tradition over experience, we always go to the show. Crappy rides, smelly animals, bad food - who says Aucklanders lack culture?

This year we set off early to beat the crowds but the show was so underpopulated when we arrived that half the rides weren't going. We killed time at the rodeo, watching wranglers hitting dozing bulls with their 10-gallon hats, trying to get them to stand up so the cowboys had something to ride.

Candy floss, clowns, the amazing Jon Zealando - this is a world where nothing much changes. There were a few cross-cultural innovations - a stall selling tapa cloth, another where you could feast on a Taniwha Burger. The kids bounced on something new and expensive called the bungy trampoline and got beaded braids put in their hair by some gorgeous West Africans.

Once, you'd come away from the show with a bag of free goodies. The only thing I got free was a scalp massage employing a scary-looking, metal-pronged device called, optimistically, the Orgasmatron. Okay, it felt good but not that good.

Back at the rides, Brett, manning the slug gun concession, blamed the gate price ($15 for adults, kids free), the Round the Bays run and the Warriors for the poor turn-out. He's been working carnivals for 11 years and remembers the days when the midway would be chocka by now.

Maybe, like church attendance and the monarchy, the Royal Easter Show is in decline. We left for home hot, cholesterol-soaked and about $150 lighter. Still, I'd hate to see it go. Where else do you get to hear someone urging you to "Hurrr-y, hurrr-y, hurrr-y" these days? And, in this high-tech age, there's a certain intergenerational kick in seeing jaded, 21st-century kids climbing off the crappy, old-fashioned rollercoaster, just as adrenalin-charged, nauseous and happy as we ever were when this was the highlight of the year.

We need to hang on to these old, flawed, kitsch rituals. As the world gets smaller, who knows what sort of genetic engineering our traditions will undergo?

The other day I caught the 10-year-old on the net, swapping customs with her Japanese internet buddy. Aiko had never heard of the Easter bunny. The 10-year-old filled her in. An egg represents new life or new form so we eat chocolate eggs on Easter Sunday.

"Oh I see," texted back Aiko. "I will imitate that custom." In Japan, she retaliated, they celebrate the Girls Festival, where girls eat diamond-shaped rice cakes, drink sake, and have fun. Which makes the whole bunny thing seem a bit lame. But it's never too late to jazz up a tired tradition. Normally we leave out a carrot for the bunny. Tonight, he gets sake.

* Tell me about your meaningless Easter-related, or other, rituals - dwichtel@hotmail.com