At the ready

What you're seeing there, high atop my kitchen cabinets, up near the TOTALLY COBWEB FREE ceiling, is our family Easter basket, patiently awaiting Holy Saturday and our parish's Easter Basket Blessing, when Aisling, as the tallest of our group of McKinney females, will climb on a chair and lift it down with a carefully wielded broom handle. Last year, the broom handle wasn't weilded carefully enough by Meelyn, and the basket plunged straight down and whacked her right in the head, which did not make her feel very blessed.

Here's a link to the instructions for assembling a traditional Easter basket that I posted a couple of years back. This is actually a custom of the Catholic and Orthodox Christians in eastern Europe, but it is such a lovely and meaningful practice -- or maybe I should say devotion? -- that we were more than pleased to adopt it for use in this American home.

This year, I have something new for our Easter basket, and that is a hand-embroidered cover for it -- also part of the traditional basket assembly -- and you cannot believe how beautiful and inexpensive it was. When it comes in the mail, I'll be sure to take a picture of it.

Also this year, we'll probably go in the same direction we've gone in other years, stuffing a small ham, a bottle of wine, some salt, a loaf of bread, some decorated eggs and a holy candle inside; you can click on that link above to read about the significance of those things. That all makes for a heavy Easter basket, burgeoning with Easter joy. And this year, I'll actually be able to take a picture at the church of everyone's Easter basket - in the past few years, there have been about six or seven families who have participated, and I hope even more will be there this year.

Anyway, with the weather so soft and spring-like these past few days, I can't help but keep glancing up there at that basket in anticipation of the happiness to come, which is part of what Lent is all about.