I love to have parties, especially dinner parties. To me, there is nothing better than setting a table, making food, bringing people together. But the sort of dichotomy about me is that on holidays there usually aren’t any sort of gatherings at my house.
I grew up that holidays were meant for family and we spent all of them with extended family. After my grandparents died, it was more about immediate family, but we all gathered in some form or fashion.
Now that I live away from the little family I have left, holidays are more about doing other things. I gather people on days that aren’t holidays, on weekends that don’t have anything else marked on the calendar to represent the dates.
But in the earlier times of my family, Holy Saturday was the bigger of the two days for us. We went to my maternal grandparents’ house where we gathered with the rest of the aunts, uncles, and cousins, walking a basket of food to the church for the food blessing service, and then having a big meal afterward.
Easter Sunday was more low key especially after my paternal grandfather died and my grandmother went to a nursing home.
That means I don’t make big plans for Easter.
Greg and I went to the 8:00 am mass and were honored to be asked to carry up the gifts for communion. Afterward, we made a stop at the University of New Mexico campus where we took some photos of my new dress with Peep. The photo above isn’t one of the best for posting, but it’s one I really like– it shows a look between a look, the flowers blooming, and Zimmerman Library behind me. It’s a happy photo, one that makes me smile when I see it.
We still had house cleaning, laundry, a meal to prepare, and dogs to bathe the rest of the day. But after my first swim of the year in the pool, dinner in the oven, and the dogs drying from their baths, I rested on a lounge chair and looked around me.
It was a 70-something degree day. The sky was mostly clear. We had a nice day.
And that was all that mattered.