Lockdown Diary — Easter in Quarantine
Well, of all holidays to land smack bang in the middle of (coronavirus quarantine — Easter was probably the best!
Can you imagine quarantine Christmas? (Please god let this remain in our imaginations…) I think we can safely forget about having a turkey each. The seven prized Turkeys in Lidl would have been fought over tooth and limb. Social distancing fighting that is.
The jagged eye over the two metre radius between you and the rival shopper inching their way to the freezer…the casual push of a trolley to trip up the beady eyed old lady creeping in at ten o’clock. Your oh-so subtle cough just as the three of you are approaching the turkey, neck to neck or trolley to trolley (2m apart). The other two would dive away covering their masks with their gloved hands — and lo! You would go home with a turkey.
You would hate the sight of that bounty when you had been living off turkey for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the next 3 weeks. A ten-pound turkey goes a long way between two adults and a toddler.
Christmas on Zoom. You unwrap last year’s newspaper off your freshly washed socks that you had been wearing last week. “No, you shouldn’t have!”. The coaster size faces of your family with cropped off Christmas hats. Everyone wearing last year’s Christmas jumpers.
Quarantine Thanksgiving. I’m not American so I don’t know how this would go down, but I imagine just “see above”. Except we’re talking about the States, so the turkey would probably last one week.
Halloween in lockdown: There will be a LOT of ghosts. Also, all that stockpiled loo roll will finally have a purpose when you can dress the whole family as Mummys.
“Trick or Treat” by trolling Zoom and Skype calls. Except…what would the treat be? Leaving the call, I suppose. And the trick? Ringing the police and telling them you had just seen your neighbor instigating a mass gathering group hug around a bonfire of N95 masks.
Where was I going with all of this…oh yes. Thank goodness it was Easter!
The one (Christian — sorry everyone. I went to a Catholic school run by German nuns in Zimbabwe. I have never celebrated Ramadan and I am really not sure what goes on during Hanukah, so this is from my narrow perspective) holiday that is pretty easy to celebrate from the confines of your own home.
All you need is some chocolate (ideally in the shape of baby rabbits or chickens. Just like Jesus would have wanted?). If you have children, anything you can fashion into an Easter bonnet would be handy. We sello-taped some strips of cardboard around our head. Although, our daughter is two so we can just about get away with these shortcuts.
Of course, if you are going the whole religious hog then you’ll need some thin strips of palm leaf to fashion crosses out of. Blast the Pope’s mass out of your laptop and drink the blood of Christ. Done!
We had a great Easter weekend in lockdown! No one more so than our toddler.
For all her 25 months of existence, poor M had never so much as a lick of chocolate. Nay — not even a whiff.
Not that J and I are setting any example. If you read the listed ingredients (you’ll need a microscope) on the back of my choice of cereal, you’ll know I start each day with a dog-bowl of sugar. I end many days with an even bigger tub of ice-cream, by my good friends Ben & Jerry. J is not as bad, but does bring home the odd bag (family size) of M’n’Ms which disappear in one sitting (especially if I am nearby).
When M comes over with a beady eye to check out these foodstuffs, suspicious of the pleasure they give us, we assure her “Yuk, yuk”, “you won’t like this” and send her off with a raisin or a blueberry.
We did toy with the idea of wrapping bundles of blueberries in tinfoil and hiding them in the garden for Easter…but one friend was so horrified at the image of Mary wandering around with a lone blueberry while we gorged ourselves on chocolate in the corner, we relented.
April 12, Easter Sunday 2020, marked a major milestone in M’s life.
On Friday, J went to our local Lidl and came back laden with bags of appropriately shaped and gaudily wrapped chocolate. Two days later on Easter Sunday while M was sleeping we hid them around the garden.
When she woke up, we led our sleepy toddler around the garden gently nudging her towards the hidden goodies. “EGH!” she would exclaim in delight each time.
Upon tasting the first Egh her eyes rounded with surprise and pleasure. She recommenced her mission of egg discovery with a new purpose in her toddler waddle.
The basket was filled then emptied into a small belly.
M was so enamored by the whole process that she insisted on wearing the cellophane wrapping from one of our Ostrich sized eggs. In the little white dress from Ethiopia from her “Babu” (what all the grandkids call my dad, it’s Swahili for grandfather) trailing in a cloak of royal blue cellophane, she made an equally beautiful and tragic sight as she wandered hopefully around the now empty garden looking for “Me Egh” (more eggs).
We spent the afternoon in our Easter crowns (I don’t think our attempts qualified as bonnets) high on sugar and silly with wine. Celebrating a Lent that that never happened (for me anyway) and a Christian holiday whose celebration I am very selective with. (Mass, sometimes. Lent, I make lots of noise about giving up wine or sugar and make it about a week. Hot Cross buns, only with butter and honey. Chocolate — ALWAYS).
All in all — Easter 2020, quarantine and all — was a good one!
Let’s all cross our gloved fingers, however, and hope I won’t still be keeping this diary by Halloween.
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P.S. Did this make you laugh? Smile at least? If you need a comic pick-me-up during these lockdown days, do check out https://piratenell.com/