Easter Madness

Easter and Christmas are the two holidays we tend to celebrate en famille. This means my mother and my siblings, my mother’s sister and her four kids, at least one other brother plus wife and kids, my grandmother, my half-aunt, a few nannies and the odd friend. A family event usually involves a lot of food and even more arguments, usually between my mother and my aunt before eventually dissolving into a full blown row between all of us. Last year’s Easter ended up in tragedy before we even arrived. The cause? We were an hour and a half late for Easter brunch!

The older I get the crazier my family seems to become, or maybe it is just more apparent to me today and we have always been barking mad. This sounds more probable. After all, my mother used to come pick us up at school dressed as a clown wearing these huge rubber shoes! For us kids this was obviously excruciatingly embarrassing. Today I mostly find her eccentricities funny but at other times I return to the child within, wanting to run away and pretend I have nothing to do with her.

Individually some of us are madder than others but all together it appears that each of our unusual strands are magnified and enhanced. Like in a theatre some of us are actors on stage while others are mere spectators. While some of us make appearances in both places my mother is always centre stage. Adding to the drama, she goes through phases with people. Currently she is having a Carlotta period (my aunt’s most recent child, a four year old toddler, a late and very unexpected arrival to the family). My mum spent most of the weekend running after Carlotta, grabbing her and tossing her around. At one point she was wearing an empty gift bag shaped like a duck over her head , running after Carlotta screaming Arrrrrhhh. Meanwhile, my brother, my sister and my half aunt Anabel (my grandfather’s youngest daughter from his second wife) were sitting in the garden happily puffing away. As soon as my mum sees that, she launches into an attack on smoking. It is not the fact they are smoking she finds so offensive but rather the fact that they smoke so “unconsciously.” My mother’s theatrics revel in the extreme – just like that she will go from an insane crawling /jumping creature into an authoritarian general who must be listened to and obeyed.

The dinner table brings out similar extremes in her. My mother and aunt can earnestly discuss the Polish chef’s dessert faux pas for much longer than what it is worth, tossing and turning why the mango sauce tasted of fish rather than mango. But in an instant my mother will stop engaging with my aunt and start teasing Carlotta or start screaming and jumping onto my brother’s lap or squeezing one of my other little cousins. This will end up in my aunt getting annoyed and shouting at my mother for misbehaving at the dinner table and just like that it’s all back to our blissful madness.

Our Easter celebration is centred around the Easter midnight Vigil at the Brompton Oratory on Saturday night. But the next day it’s all about the family brunch held at my aunt’s house in the countryside or at our home in Germany. At my aunt’s, where we all gathered again this year, punctuality is key (I note the cause of last year’s show down). Then everyone eats as much as they can. Since we are such a cosmopolitan bunch we have foods from all over the globe. My grandmother is Hungarian but her mother was Russian so every Easter she makes a white creamy mountain of goo called Pasach (or something like that its apparently a typical dish). My brother lives in Switzerland so he brought buckets of chocolates, Swiss Easter cakes and the Swiss answer to Macarons, Luxemburgerli. We also had some French Macarons and an abundance of hardboiled and colourful real eggs and chocolate eggs. The game we play with the eggs is called “titschen” and involves bashing one egg against someone else’s egg. The egg that remains untouched wins. One of my younger cousins Pilar adores this game. Conveniently my mother likes to eat seven eggs so Pilar is kept entertained by titsching with my Mum. No one would dare to titsch an egg without eating it – I mean that would be a criminal waste of food! My mother’s contribution to the feast is a gigantic Colonna, an Italian pastry/sweet bread speciality and a huge chunk of Parmigano imported from Rome. Add the usual brunch foods such as bread cheese, sausages, salmon and you get what I mean by stuffing our faces.

The Easter egg hunt used to be quite an essential part of Easter because we are as greedy for presents as we are for food but it has sort of fizzled out over the years. There was an open war between the present lovers or the materialists led by my mother, and tightly followed by me, and my aunt, who is more of a all -we- need- is- love- kind- of -person and therefore in favour of less rather than more. We might not even bother at all to hide all the gifts throughout the huge garden anymore had we not so many young cousins, nephews and nieces. Some of the gifts hidden outside the reach of the kiddies are lost every year much to the anger of my aunt. Talking about nieces this year we were blessed with yet another midget and this one was really really unexpected. Mira spearheads a new generation born into my cousin Alex’s chaotic and unmarried existence. He is not only quite a few years younger than me he also has trouble hanging on to a phone, passport or set of keys for longer than a few days. He used to enter his flat via the balcony regularly which didn’t go down well on Elm Park Road. Nevertheless he actually seems to be growing into his new role as a father quite perfectly and the little girl is a dream (and the mother is a picture book mother so don’t go calling social services) ! So although a traditional catholic family we are an extremely modern dare I say liberal patchwork tribe throughout the six generations.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Princess Diaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.