Hoppy Easter!

My most memorable Easter has got to be the year I gave up sugar for Lent. My family isn't the church-going type, so I never knew what the holiday was all about, aside from chocolate eggs and bunnies. So when my friend, Bethany, told me that she was observing Lent, I decided to join her.

Our plan was not to eat anything with added sugar. That year I missed out on Valentine chocolates, birthday cakes, wedding cake and ski trip goodies. However, we did have a little breathing room...for instance, we could still have microbrewed beer, as there isn't any added sugar...and alcohol is naturally occuring (you see, we had our priorities!). We even found sugar-free chocolate, which sounds like a great loophole except that it
a) tastes horrible
b) can cause diarrhea!

Easter is a religious holiday, so we decided to try a different church every Sunday. We intended to try a synagogue, a Russian Orthodox church and maybe a mosque as well, but somehow we ended up going to a lot of Anglican churches. We started off getting "ashed" on Ash Wednesday, and for those many weeks, went to a different one pretty much every Sunday. It was an interesting experience...sometimes entertaining, sometimes nice, sometimes peaceful, sometimes a bit boring and once even scary! Attendance is rapidly dropping in churches, so as soon as parishoners see "new blood", they get all excited. The sweet old ladies at one place invited us to have cookies and tea...but there was one group who pounced on us as soon as the service was over and wanted our e-mails and phone numbers before they even asked us our names!

Finally, Easter Sunday rolled around. We went to the biggest, grandest church downtown. The place was packed and it was quite the spectacle - women were dolled up in hats and white gloves, and little girls in new pastel frocks. All Bethany and I could think of was our stash in the car...for days we had been planning for this day of indulgence and bought each other Easter eggs and our favourite treats from the bakery. We had mapped out all the places we were going to hit after church: Dairy Queen, patisseries, chocolate stores...

As soon as the service was over, we ran outside and were ravenously biting off the heads of our Easter bunnies right on the church steps! I hate to think what people thought of us two nuts! We gorged ourselves sick in the car, and promptly went into a sugar coma. We never did make it to any of the places we had planned to go, and spent the rest of the day nursing upset tummies.

See, denying yourself chocolate is unhealthy!