Easter 2026

Growing up in my big Catholic family, Easter was a big deal. Lent came first, of course, and giving something up was simply expected. I always lobbied hard for brussel sprouts and overcooked liver, and was consistently redirected toward sweets or after-school cartoons. Wasn't having tuna casserole every Friday sacrifice enough?

When Easter weekend finally arrived, Doreen and Mic would load us into the car on Friday night and we'd head over the mountains to Yakima. The whole family gathered there, and given that Doreen was one of eighteen children, the word family doesn't quite cover it. Cousins in every direction. Aunts and uncles everywhere. And oh, the laughter. To ten-year-old me, it felt like the whole world had shown up.

There was a particular kind of happiness in those days that I've honestly never quite found a word for. It wasn't just fun. It was belonging in the most uncomplicated sense, the kind you don't have to earn or maintain or explain. These were the same cousins I spent summers with, but Easter had its own feeling entirely. The games that appeared from nowhere. The laughter that got started with one person and kept going until nobody could remember what had been funny in the first place. For one whole weekend, the world felt exactly the right size.

We could always count on a new spring outfit, adventures with our cousins, and an Easter egg hunt where dozens of plastic eggs containing candy, toys, and money were stashed in hiding places all across the yard and into the neighboring cherry orchard. There were always a few eggs in the lot that contained something like a box of yucky raisins. To me, those were the bad eggs. Though I'll say, some of my cousins didn't see it that way at all. They loved raisins. (Note: A 1.5 oz box of raisins has 138 calories vs. three Hershey's Kisses at 108 calories, in case you were wondering.)

I'd take chocolate over raisins any day.

And then came Sunday afternoon, and the car ride home. Our family wasn't one for talking about feelings, we kept those tender moments quietly to ourselves, and I was a young girl still learning to navigate her own inner world, mostly on her own. Something would settle into me on that drive back, watching the miles pile up between me and all of that noise and warmth. I didn't have a name for it. I only knew it was there, and that it came every single time, and that I wouldn't have told anyone even if I'd known what to say.

Looking back now, what strikes me about those raisin eggs isn't the disappointment itself. It's what happened after. One find that wasn't what you were hoping for, and suddenly you're moving through the yard differently. A little more carefully. Shaking each egg before you open it, deciding in advance what it probably contains, protecting yourself from being let down again.

But here's what I've come to understand. Whether an egg is a bad one depends entirely on who's holding it. What I called a disappointment, somebody else picked up and kept. One cousin's raisin was another cousin's treasure. The egg hadn't changed. Only the hands holding it.

I've caught myself doing exactly that in my own life, and more times than I'd like to admit. Moving through a season already braced for the letdown. Deciding something was a loss before I'd even fully opened it, because a few earlier ones had stung. And sometimes the opposite, which is its own kind of trap: holding onto something I knew in my bones wasn't right for me, turning it over and over, reluctant to put it down because everything else in the basket had been so beautiful. As if keeping the raisin somehow honored how good the rest of it had been.

What we carry forward from our disappointments shapes what we reach for next. Sometimes that's wisdom. And sometimes it's just self-protection dressed up as wisdom.

A bad egg is just a bad egg. Or maybe it's someone else's treasure. Either way, it doesn't have to be the whole story of the hunt.

What I keep coming back to, all these years later, is the image of all of us spilling out into that yard. No hesitation. No inventory of past hunts. Just complete and total hope, running toward whatever was out there, trusting it was going to be good. We hadn't yet learned to protect ourselves from the raisins. We just ran.

There's something worth reclaiming in that.

So wherever you find yourself this weekend, whether Easter is a sacred day for you or simply a Sunday in spring you've claimed as your own, I hope you'll put down whatever you've been carrying that was never really yours to hold. The chocolate is still out there. It's been waiting.

Love & light,

Michèle