Berkley Center

I am nearly 21 years old, and the Easter Bunny still visits my house. Twenty years of practice have honed this holiday rabbit’s basket-filling skills to an art—a base of pink or yellow fluff (not the stringy confetti filler that inevitably ends up strewn across the carpet by the dog), Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups shaped as small eggs and wrapped in festively pastel colored foil, candied nuts instead of the standard Peeps (a vestige of the braces era, marshmallows being too sticky for wire-clad teeth) and always the swimsuit or shirt I’d been most recently eyeing at J.Crew. The Easter Bunny still remembers the egg hunt as well, not deterred in the least that my brother, sister, and I no longer wake at 6:00 a.m. Easter morning to scour the backyard for brightly colored plastic eggs, but are instead roused by our parents at the last possible moment necessary to make ourselves presentable for Mass, leaving the eggs until after both church and brunch.

One would think that at ages 16, 18, and 20 my siblings and I would have since outgrown these childhood rituals, yet our parents continue the ruse, partly out of tradition and partly out of denial that their children have indeed grown up. For our part, we do not protest, motivated by the same factors as our parents—tradition, refusal to accept that we may very well be too old for such games, and also, I believe, because our culture demands it. Easter in the United States has become, undeniably, a consumer holiday—a deeply religious celebration bastardized by cute little bunny and chick shaped candies, a dentist’s worst nightmare second only to Halloween. If not my own family’s Easter traditions, a trip to any CVS during the weeks leading up to Easter will speak clearly to this fact—aisles devoted solely to Easter candy and decorations, advertising targeted at expectant young children, and their parents saddled with the job of playing Easter Bunny.

Now change scenes: leave the Wisconsin Avenue CVS for Salamanca, Spain in the midst of Semana Santa, Holy Week. The most immediate difference is the absence of Easter baskets, “cestos de Pascua” as I tried to explain to my host mom. Just this simple fact illustrates what has struck me most in Spain during Semana Santa: not the processions of men dressed in white garments eerily similar to those of Klansmen, but rather the lack of consumerism surrounding the holiday. And what'’s even more odd is that where one would expect to find consumer culture in the United States, in Spain one finds religious culture. According to my host mom, the Easter Bunny does not frequently make the trans-Atlantic journey to visit Spanish children; parents may buy a few special chocolates, but the excitement of the week preceding Easter Sunday is not found in receiving these candies, but rather in attending any number of the many processions, overtly religious affairs all recalling in some way the passion of Christ. Public announcements do not assume the politically correct sensitivity to religious pluralism to which I am so accustomed in the United States. Billboards state simply “Buena Pascua,” oftentimes with an image of a crucifix and with no trace of bunnies and candies to dilute the religious reminder, ignoring completely that this Christian holiday is not universally recognized. 

It's as if celebrating Easter—attending the processions, making and eating the typical dishes—is not so much a part of being Catholic as it is an integral part of being Spanish. That is not to conclude that Spaniards, as an over-generalization, are deeply religious (the churches and cathedrals still strangely vacant for an Easter Sunday); however, it is to say that a religious identity, namely a Catholic identity, is traditionally and continues to be tied to a cultural identity. Semana Santa in any Spanish city might as well be a cultural showcase, a smorgasbord of tradition. Consumerism isn't necessary for the hype, my traditional Easter basket and egg hunt superfluous to the continual string of religiously rooted festivities that mark Semana Santa. All that is necessary is pride in, or appreciation of, Spanish culture.