How a three-year-old explained Easter to me
It’s Good Friday and, while my parents are at church, my three-year-old is having one big mash-up of a holiday. She’s singing a Christmas song and having a rummage around the house looking for hidden chocolate. This is not an egg hunt. We didn’t hide it so that she could find it. We hid it because we didn’t want her to find it. Despite our best efforts, every half an hour or so she comes into the living room with a twinkle in her eye and something in her hand.
–Mummy, who is this for? — she asks very politely. I get up, ask her where she found it, put it back, and lock another door.
–You need to wait until granny and gramps come back — I tell her. Then she asks me:
–Where are granny and gramps? — I tell her they are at Church.
–Why are they at Church, mummy? Are there chocolate bunnies at Church?
This, my friends, is every parent’s dreaded moment: when the chocolate bunny meets the religious holiday. Why are there no chocolate bunnies inside the Church on Easter if they are everywhere? I try to change the subject. Impossible. At that point, I start talking very generally about Spring and rabbit symbolism, and have you noticed that the scary trees outside are not scary anymore because of all the new green leaves and blooming flowers? She nods, but doesn’t take her eyes off me. She wants more explaining. I sigh. Don’t they cover this at crèche, for f**’s sake? I look around the living room.
–See Jesus over there? — She nods, looking at the statue. — Well, he was born on Christmas day, but then he died just before Easter, love — she looks sad.
–And then on Easter day he was kind of born again… — Now she looks bewildered. She takes a moment to collect her thoughts, and then asks me:
–Like Snow White, mummy?
And there it is. My lightbulb moment.
You see, from the moment she started asking me to read her stories, I decided not to shy away from the verb “to die”. As a result, every time someone dies in a story, she finds it sad but not terrifying. Interestingly enough, she has never asked me what dying means (yet). But her sadness and concern for those who have died makes me think that, somehow, she gets the gist of the message.
Spoiler alert: dying, and literally everything in between, applies to, well, basically all fairy tales out there. As a parent, I know that tales such as Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, and, of course, Little Red Riding Hood, to mention but a few, are not for the faint of heart. There’s a lot of scary stuff going on, and even with the “softer” versions, it’s impossible to escape the fact that fairy tales are dark and grim.
Which brings us straight to the subject of Easter, and the problem of how to explain the whole Crucifix situation to little kids. I’m no longer a practicing Catholic, and I stopped celebrating Easter a long time ago. But I love telling my kid good stories. That is what the story of Jesus is to me: a good story. So, while I don’t feel obliged by faith to explain Easter (or Christmas) to my child, I do think it’s important that she knows the stories behind the cultural and religious celebrations that are going on in our community, and that are so important to her grandparents.
And what better way to explain difficult concepts like death and resurrection than through the stories she already knows? I was struck by my daughter’s response to my clumsy attempt to explain Easter to her. I already knew that fairy tales make us wiser precisely because they help us deal with really difficult feelings, fears and emotions. But what I was witnessing was Albert Einstein’s famous quote in action: “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
There’s another quote in my mind, by Neil Gaiman, a writer I deeply admire. He starts Coraline like this: “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten”.
I looked at my three-year-old daughter and decided to follow her lead. I started explaining Easter with the help of Snow White (and Cruella too). Who knows where this will take us? Which dragons will we beat in this way? Maybe it will even help her to challenge gender-biased conceptions of God. The sky is the limit, my friends.
Thank you for reading.
Become a Medium member by clicking on this link.
Your membership fee will directly support me and other writers on the platform. You will also get access to all the stories on Medium.
