Good Friday and Easter Monday are national holidays here, which means everyone gets the days off. Sweet, four-day weekend! To give you some background, school in Australia is year-round and they get 2 weeks off between each of 4 terms. Parker’s school has a big Easter celebration the last day of Term one, which was today. Part of the Easter celebration was an Easter Hat Parade. Now, first let me start by saying I am sensitive to Christian centered holidays, especially in school. I have nothing against Christianity, or their holidays - as I celebrate them myself - but I’ve seen what it’s like from the other side – the other side meaning non-Christian side. Not only am I married to a fabulous Jewish man but I also hail from San Francisco where you can celebrate Kwanzaa or Waitangi Day and no one would question why. I also realize I am too PC, which makes a lot of people crazed (some of you reading this I’m sure). It’s America’s nature to be PC because of the “melting pot” vision (although the new PC term is “mixed salad” because we aren’t all melted together, but tossed instead – I’m not kidding, I heard this). Nonetheless, not only Kyle Broflovski feels left-out, and since I’m for the underdog I had to mention it.
So an Easter Hat Parade at school is bound to make me raise my eyebrows – it’s so not PC! Also, as an alternative to this time of year, people can’t say, “Happy Spring,” like in America, because it’s autumn! What do they say instead? They say, “Happy Easter.” What about those kids that don’t celebrate Easter? I haven’t heard an utterance of Passover.
Anyway, moving on… So we needed to make Parker a hat for his Easter Hat Parade. The class room parent sent around some pictures of kids wearing various Easter hats in order to give ideas. These pictures contained adorable smiling children with bright, colorful, feathery bonnets. Some hats had little chicks strewn about; others had sparkly Easter eggs decorating the hat brim, or hanging down from strings. Some were cardboard, others straw with ribbons and lace, and some decked-out baseball caps with bunny parts sticking out. I took this email to say, anything goes with the Easter hat. When Parker learned he needed to make an Easter hat he emphatically questioned, “Mom, what are we going to do?!” All of a sudden, (it’s times like these that I pat myself on the back for my brilliance), I said, “Parker, let’s decorate one of your football helmets!” Naturally, he LOVED this idea. Then I began to imagine sticking eggs all over it, or a big bunny on top and thought, nah, that’s not Parker, and again - here’s to my brilliance - I said, “Parker, how about we make your football helmet into a rooster’s head?!” Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. I bring you Parker’s rooster head for the Easter hat parade!
I won’t go into the gory details of how we actually made the hat over several days, many pieces of paper, and many frustrated wide-eyed moments by myself thinking, "Really, you're a strange kid," but I will say, I thought he looked awesome. It was a joint effort, and I had to bite my tongue more than 20 times during the helmet making process, but who wants a polished product created by the parent? As you can see from this video (P is wearing a green shirt, brown shorts, with his socks pulled up (of course), and oh, a football rooster helmet) there were many different styles, sizes, and colors.
Initially I didn’t love the idea of an Easter celebration but it was adorable and allowed Parker, once again, to let his freak flag fly. PC or not, I didn’t mutter my San Franciscan liberal views on Easter – when in Rome, right? I will say that Australians are not PC, but is anyone outside of California?!
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