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Madame Lacourse’s Grade § and 6 students at
tense moments last week with an engineering stress test on their paper bridge -

"= the two sheets of paper held together by 12 staples suspended six kilograms

of weight It was one of the many aciivities coming up as School District 88

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UPA Ba teatime compinc
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prepares for Science Week, April 22-28. More on page B5.

The way |
I see tt...

by Stephanie Wiebe

Sometimes Easter really gets on
my nerves. Not that it’s a bad
holiday. After all, Christians
throughout North America cel-
ebrate this holy day, children get
to gorge themselves on chocolate,
even acthelsts get a day off from
work, I’ve never heard a satisfac-
tory explanation of how the
bunny and the eggs got into a
holiday calebrating the resurrec-
tlon of Jesus, but I can let that
slide by. Easter is o.k. But it’s

not an easy holiday like Christm-
as, Thanksgiving, or even Ground
Hog’s Day, because they keep
moving it around every year.

I realise that there’s a formula
to this event -- the first Sunday
after the paschal full moon, ac-
cording to Webster’s Ninth New
Collegiate Dictionary. A paschal
full moon is “the fourteenth day
of a lunar month occurring on or
next after March 21 according to
a fixed set of ecclesiastical calen-

dar rules and without regard to
the real moon". In other words,
regular people still don’t know
when Easter wilt be next year or
the year after that, unless you
have a dated list or know your
paschal full moons pretty well.

I was raised Catholic, but
nobody ever explained all this to
me, The nuns just said, "Here,
put. this doily on your head and
walk quietly into the church."
You didn’t question a nun --
Sister Theresa had a stern look
that could paralyze a kid for
life. I could never have asked
about Easter being moved around
all the time, lest I get that look
and succumb to whatever fate
would befall a smart-aleck kid
(there was a rumour going around
about the religious statues in the
church foyer).

As a kid, it never mattered
when Easter came, only that we
couldn't wait for the frenzied

Do bunnies bay at the paschal full moon?

hunt for eggs and the candy that
followed. Sometimes we didn’t
find all the eggs, and in late
May, if you happened to come
upon that remaining egg, an
interesting odor lingered, remind-
ing you of that unfinished hunt
at Easter. Which has nothing to
do with the changing dates of
Easter, except for the fact that if
Easter came earty, that late-found
egg was that much more ripe in
May.

Now, Easter never arrives in
February or May, always March
or April -- at least we know that
the paschal full moon will guar-
antee this much, It’s always a
Sunday, that’s definite, but you
still can’t plan a year ahead with-
out a calendar. You know you
can plant your garden by Victoria
Day in May, but you don’t know
if there will be daffodils bloom-
ing for Easter next year. Some-
body should’ve thought of this
when they decided to move
Easter around.

And what is the significance of
Easter Monday? This is a day I
cannot find any religious reasons
for, just an easy excuse for an
extra day off. Not that | mind,

but I wonder why they added it
on. You never hear of a Ground
Hog’s Monday or Hallowe’en
Monday. Somehow I think this
relates not to paschal moons, but
to government employees and
union holidays.

So anyway, I don’t have any
idea why, but Easter seems late
this year. The kids have had their
spring break and we've started
the downhill slide into summer,.
so it seems like Easter should be
long gone by now.

Guess it’s not worth arguing
about. Nobody’s going to change
Easter, and it just wouldn’t be the
same holiday if they did. One
interesting item to note: The city
of Terrace claims that the paschal
full moon has no relation whatso-
ever to our changing garbage
collection days. But the date of
Easter is always changing, and so
is the date of my garbage collect-
ion. I detect a pattern here.

And I do still wonder about
bunny and the eggs.

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