Easter does not rank amongst my preferred holidays, maybe because the Easter Bunny is not as powerful a social phenomenon as the Jackolantern or the Thanksgiving Turkey. Face it: it’s a day about the son of god coming back from the dead that is merrily glossed over with pagan egg hunts so that it’s not the religious equivalent of Thriller.

I typically spend Easter hiding from my family. This makes it, in effect, no different than any other day of the year. Past tactics have included unplugging my phone, celebrating passover instead, or having my boss invite me to her house for dinner. This year i decided that the best place to hide would be in plain view, so i invited myself, Elise, and four friends to dine at chez-krisis. The plan was that my mother would be overwhelmed by trying to chat like the merrily socially well-adjusted woman she is that i would escape largely unquestioned and unscathed. My mother, after freaking out for three weeks because she’s never had that many people in her house for an occasion not related to a funeral, seemed to take the planning of the event in stride and with only mild outbreaks of frantic chain-smoking while attempting to invoke the maternal instinct for hosting that she’s let lay dormant for all these years.

It went off nearly without a hitch. I was chastised repeatedly for serving cocktails to my guests before dinner, and told i need to seek alchohol counseling when a single drunken exploit was highlighted in conversation, but was otherwise left unquestioned about my finances, job hunt, and ever-mysterious FUTURE. It was small, as dinners go and, as is typical of such events in my family, consisted of a majority of Italian food and no turkeys, greens, hams, or yams. What wasn’t typical was that i got to enjoy the company of both my friends and my family, which made it much more festive for me.

We ended the night with copious Italian pastries and a marathon of Trading Spaces. Pretty much an ideal day.