What's Easter Like in America?

Bonnets, bunnies and baked goods

We spend Easter Sunday – Brandin and I, and our boys (four, at last count, although sometimes it feels like a dozen, or more); Brandin’s siblings and their partners, kids, sometimes a dog or two; uncles, aunts, partners and cousins, at Brandin’s grandma’s house, a little north of Fort Wayne. Lunch, an egg hunt, and nonsensical conversations are the order of the day.

Brandin, his brothers – a twin who looks nothing like him and a younger brother who I suspect can burp the alphabet – and their sister hide dozens of plastic eggs around the garden, each stuffed with some kind of revolting American chocolate. After we eat, or sometimes before, depending on how the organisation has gone, the children are set free to hunt down their eggs.

They’re given a quota, which you’d think would make it less exciting – I mean, why bother trying to be the best egg-finder, if the worst egg-finder will end up with the exact same number of eggs as you, the champion? – but apparently not: they run and jump and high-five one another (at least, in the earlier moments, before things get feral, which is approximately six minutes in).

This year, my sister Beatrice and her four boys come too. It’s their last Easter in Fort Wayne – they’re moving to Knoxville, Tennessee, this summer – and, though I know they could come back to visit, I doubt it will coincide with this particular holiday (American schools get Good Friday off, only; in Ireland, there are two weeks of Easter holidays, with Easter Sunday in the middle).

I’d spent Easter Saturday – when I surely should have been fasting, or praying, or some combination of the two – making a mango curd, the recipe for which I’d found online. I’d promised to make a pavlova, and thought mango curd would be something different and exotic (I usually do whipped cream and berries, which is a classic combination and, I now know, not one worth deviating from).

The recipe had five stars, from over a dozen reviews. “I love this so much – I spread it on toast for breakfast. Yum!!!” read one particularly effusive reviewer.

It looked simple enough, which was obviously a plus: puree the mango, combine with sugar, egg yolks and eggs over a medium heat and then bring to a simmer, whisking continuously. When it reaches 180C, add cold, cubed butter until the butter has melted. Transfer to a dish and refrigerate overnight. What could go wrong?!

I still don’t know. I have no answer to what could go wrong, only that it did. Honestly, I had an inkling, as I cooked it, that the aroma it was giving off was, well, off.

“It tastes,” said Brandin, gamely taking another mouthful off the proffered spoon, “almost… rotten.”

This is a crucial difference between Brandin and me. Were someone to say to me, “I think this tastes off – what do you think?” there is almost zero chance I would try whatever it was they were asking about. I know, I know, this is unhelpful, but I just couldn’t. I can feel my stomach protesting at the mere thought of it. Having tasted something once and decided it tasted ROTTEN, of all things, there is absolutely no chance in hell that I would try it a second time. Oh no, not I. Brandin, on the other hand, will try anything twice (probably three times).

Anyway, the mango curd didn’t turn out. To add insult to injury, it called for an entire stick of butter; tonight, Brandin decides he’ll make banana bread, only to realise we’re short a stick of butter. The mango curd was taunting me. (Figuratively speaking, because I obviously washed it down the sink and turned on the garbage disposal.)

In the end, I opt for whipped cream and berries. Everyone loves it. The moral of the story is, sometimes the classic combo is enough. Meghan Markle, eat your heart out.

We do Easter pot luck style, which is a very American way of saying everyone brings a dish. Along with the pavlova, Brandin made deviled eggs and smoked a ham overnight, in a marinade of cherry preserve and orange juice. Someone brings a turkey. There is macaroni cheese (also smoked, which is not my favourite, I’ll confess), mashed potatoes, corn, a Greek salad (cucumber, feta, tomatoes and olives), bread rolls and turkey gravy.

Beatrice brings a vegetable plate and mixed fruit, which we combine with my leftover berries to make up a fruit plate. She also makes an Easter bunny cake from the Super Valu promotional magazine produced by The Irish Times (she omits the sprinkles, because she has taste).

When she arrives, she hands me a wooden board with two layers of parchment paper on top of it, between which are some kinds of icing (or so I think) shapes.

“Can you put that in the fridge? I think they need to set some more,” she asks me.

I turn 90 degrees with the board in my hands and promptly… drop it straight on to the floor.

The shapes – white chocolate, as it turns out – survive, but my pride takes a beating. I suppose Jesus would approve.

Before we eat, Brandin’s mum says a prayer: something about Jesus, and how his sacrifice allowed us to come together and eat pulled ham on Easter. (Not quite.) We have to tell one of the teenagers to turn off TikTok as she begins her Easter message.

I feel the beginnings of hysterical laughter begin to bubble up in my throat. I look at the ground and counted, slowly, down from 50. The giggles subside, for which I’m thankful, although I do wonder what they would have done to my relationship with my mother-in-law. Would it ever have recovered? I suspect not.

I’d put an Easter bonnet on Roman for the occasion, but Brandin takes it off within five minutes of our arriving at grandma’s house.

“It was cutting off circulation to his fat neck!” he says, rudely, I thought, but also: this is why our 12-year-old won’t let me tie his hair up, saying it hurts too much. He wasn’t taught young enough that one must suffer for style. Beauty is pain, and so on. I’m starting Roman the way I mean to go on.

said 12-year-old and his baby brother

We hand Roman back and forth between relatives; when I think he seems sleepy, I put him in his carrier and Beatrice and I take a walk around outside. The weather has been threatening thunderstorms, but it’s mild, warm, even, with a strong enough wind to have him whimpering sporadically.

“You’re fine!” I admonish him, thinking, if he’s going to be a wimp about the bonnet, I’ll make sure he’s at least tough when it comes to inclement weather.

The pulled ham is a success, although honestly I could do with it being slightly less sweet and slightly less salty. This is the kind of critique that has led to Brandin’s strongly held belief that all Irish food is incredibly bland; he doesn’t understand that our tastebuds are just that much more refined. They weren’t ruined at a young age by boxed mac and cheese and Cheetos.

The Easter cake is the true triumph. Even Atlas loves it, and not just because it has Cadbury’s Mini Eggs on top, although I’m sure that helps.

For his part, he loves Easter because it involves eggs; earlier in the weekend, we had used an egg dyeing kit to make “dinosaur eggs” (you can make them yourself without the kit – they turned out brilliantly), which was a great success until we (myself, Brandin and his brother) each ate one, to his horror. Much bawling ensued.

On Easter Sunday, he eats several mini Kit Kats, a single, solitary Milk Dud he then spits into the bin (“bleugh!”), several Cadbury’s Mini Eggs and some cake. He misses his nap and is a demon at bedtime; an hour later, as the threatened thunderstorm finally hits, he wakes up screaming and asks if he can come in to our bed.

I feel terrible telling him no, but the baby is in there too, and between him and the two of us (not small people by any stretch) space is at a premium in there as it is. It didn’t occur to me to oust Brandin, force him into one of the other boys’ beds (they were at their mom’s), but I’ll remember that as an option for next time.

Easter feels like a bigger deal here than it was at home, where we’d get a single chocolate egg from the Easter bunny, and have lamb for dinner, maybe have our grandparents over to eat it with us. My Mum made a simnel cake once or twice, something she denies now, but I remember it clearly. I replicated it last year, but it didn’t go down all that well. Marzipan is very divisive. It’s the party politics of the cake decorating world.

Our children don’t get Easter eggs, at least not in the Irish style – the only place I’ve ever seen them available to buy is in the DeBrand’s, the bougie chocolatier that sells caramel apples in the autumn for $45 a pop.

Instead, the Easter bunny leaves them Easter baskets, a tradition that had been established by the time I met Brandin, otherwise, let me tell you, I would not have even considered doing it.

Each child gets a pastel-coloured wicker basket – it is a source of great pride to me that I have managed to keep these, year after year, and re-use them, because the sheer waste of the American holiday machine is a horrifying sight to behold – filled with paper straw (ditto), into which random gifts are piled, most of which have, at best, a tenuous link to the day itself.

This year, they each got a Lindt chocolate bunny; a mini Lego set; a really annoying frog that squeals and sticks out its tongue, kind of like one of those party streamer things you used to blow into (?!? am I imagining this?); a weird fidget toy; two miniature Cadbury eggs sent over by granny (should have been three but I ate them have no idea what happened the extra three); and some random boxes of sweets I selected, Sourpatch and Milk Duds and God knows what else.

This selection is, I would go so far as to say, restrained. Last year, I bought them each a set of Hanna Andersson PJs which immediately disappeared to their mom’s house, never to be seen again. Madness!

I’ve seen people on TikTok showing the Easter baskets they’ve compiled for their kids; one particularly hateful woman bought her children each an iPad Mini. (Important to note: an iPad Mini is $500.)

I used to joke the the reason Americans go so overboard when it comes to holidays is that they have no culture of their own, so they must fashion it out of cheap plastic and welcome mats, but we’re not allowed to joke about America any more so I’ll say this: what America lacks in substance, it makes up for in enthusiasm.

On a very basic level, I love it. I love an excuse to get together with family. I love an excuse to overeat. I love an excuse to hand the baby off to someone else while I eat another deviled egg. I love it when the children have a task that involves their being out in the garden for a while.

I love watching Atlas search around the back garden for eggs, even though I feel I have confused him with my talk of the evil front-garden bunnies (who eat my tulips), who he has now spent weeks throwing pieces of mulch at, saying “take that, bunnies!” and “bunnies, run away!” To suddenly have a benevolent, back-garden bunny delivering chocolate must be a little disorienting for him.

I think I would, however, trade all of that for a decent chocolate egg (Terry’s Chocolate Orange, to be precise, although I’d also settle for a Maltesers egg or, at a pinch, a Smarties egg) and some of Marks & Spencer’s salted caramel hot cross buns. Because we all know that, when it comes to supermarket baked goods, no amount of American enthusiasm will ever make up for the horrors in their bakery aisles.

P.S. Happy Easter! We say that a lot in America. I’m almost at the point of adding a “y’all” to the end. Almost…