When you raise the idea of Easter traditions, it's bound to be a subject that draws input. It's got something for everyone -- obviously, it's the most important time of the year for Christians everywhere. But even for those not inclined to those religious tenets, you've got the Easter Bunny, scads of chocolate and other candy (which really gives Halloween a run for the candy title, when you think about it), and for those that might be both non-Christian and well... diabetic, there's going to be some decent sales designed to attract the consumer in all of us.
When I was growing up, my family always got together for Easter dinner after church -- usually a dine-out experience to keep it a little different from Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was a time to eat, talk, and go our separate ways after the kids collected their Easter baskets filled with chocolate that inevitably melted while in grandma's car.
My own traditions are pretty minimal -- I've never gotten into coloring eggs or any of the other trappings of the occasion. About the closest thing that I have to tradition is buying packages of delicious Marshmallow Peeps, aging them in the open for about 24 hours, and then laying waste to their yellow ranks. Occasionally, Peeps will expire in the name of science, because sometimes you just can't fight that desire to see what happens to a specimen in the microwave. ::demented laughter::
Ahem... I digress.
One of the more novel aspects of instantly acquiring your spouse's family when getting married is becoming familiar with their traditions. Every family has them, granted some may be more mundane than others -- I was fortunate, though, to marry into a family whose internal culture is, shall we say... richly developed. (I should probably be up front and point out that a lot of my wife's family regularly reads my work, and I'm keeping that in mind. If anything you read here seems like something short of complimentary, I assure you that you're mistaken. Things that appear to be thinly-veiled bits of diplomacy are merely examples of poor writing on my part.)
So, the factors thus far: it's just about Eastertide, and my in-laws are very much in touch with their Polish Catholic heritage. While by no means being a trait exclusive to this family, Easter is very important as a religious event. And secondly, Easter dinner, its associated penultimate dinner, and other various satellite meals (I'm still working out exactly how the ideal dining map is laid out) are approached with a certain zeal and respect for tradition that I simultaneously awe and admire. There are lots and lots of Polish foods (which I've discovered I really kind-of like, and I'm not an adventurous eater), including specialty sausages imported from Chicago. Like I said, the food is taken very seriously. But sitting on the table amidst all of this food is the real object of my fascination: The Butter Lamb.
No, that's in the literal sense. It's a lamb. Made out of butter. I stopped short of actually measuring it last time, but I'd approximate the Butter Lamb to be somewhere from five to seven inches in height and about the length of a stick of butter (I tried to replicate the rough dimensions of Butter Lamb at home as research for this piece, but we didn't have enough sticks in stock). That's not exaggerating, either -- not like it'll be twenty years from now when I'm telling this story and Butter Lamb will be five feet tall, bigger than a VW Bug, and is a distant relation of Paul Bunyan's Blue Ox, Babe. The Butter Lamb commands the table, surveying the food with its serene, jaundiced complexion.
It's a very small thing to fixate on, especially when there are so many broader differences between my family and hers, but I can't get over the fact that there's a lamb sculpted out of butter sitting there looking at me. In my family, what with our sturdy Methodist sensibilities, the butter was never given a higher function other than sitting on a butter dish, frequently being ferried around the table, being used as a spread. To me, this is the traditional roll of butter -- functional, dependable butter. What else would you use it for? The act of turning said butter into a sculpted lamb initially struck me as a form of idolatry. Golden calf? Buttery lamb.
As it turns out, the Butter Lamb surprisingly (alarmingly?) isn't the apex of seasonal creativity with this one -- during a previous conversation about the Butter Lamb with a Lutheran friend of mine (born and bred in the Lutheran bastion of Wisconsin), he mentioned that he's seen this go a step further, and that people will occasionally sculpt a full-blown Butter Jesus. So many questions with this one -- would this be a happy, caring vision of our Lord, or since it's Easter, is it more appropriate to go with some form of Jesus on the cross? How could you bring yourself to whittle away at Butter Jesus? He just died for our sins, and yet we ask him to butter our rolls? Strange. But like I said, I'm the guy with the background of functional butter.
So this year -- as I brazenly hack away at the Butter Lamb's rear end to appease my desire for tastier dinner rolls -- I'm going to use it as an opportunity to embrace the new and build around it. And perhaps one day, I'll be the one in charge of bringing the Butter Lamb into being. It'll certainly have more meaning than the wanton destruction of innocent Peeps.
