The Easter Bunny Discovered

For better or worse, holidays are gold mines of memory material deserving a place in your life story. They are uniquely personal, with no two years quite the same, and universal, with  family, community and national traditions. Some people look forward to them, others dread them. Still others ignore them.

Easter is a good example. When I was young, it meant a new dress for church, dying and hiding eggs, and eating lots of candy. Since we didn’t live within easy reach of any relatives, we seldom spent it with extended family. It was primarily a Sunday morning event marked by sermons filled with impassioned reminders of suffering and transcendence.

Best of all, even now, it signals the time when the world is waking from winter’s slumber. Weather is warming, spring flowers blooming, and trees becoming green. It’s a season of hope, joy and rebirth, whatever one’s spiritual tradition.

Any of these aspects makes good story content. One of the first stories I wrote after discovering the joys of lifestory writing is The Easter Bunny Discovered. That Easter was a watershed moment in my young life, and the story offered a chance to add deft background strokes about my life in general at that point.

I’ll admit that I did not recognize the full import of that story when I wrote it. At that point I simply thought of it as a fun memory. Soon after writing it, I discovered the free member sites available on ThirdAge.com and posted eight of my favorite stories there. ThirdAge long since discontinued that service, but the stories live on in a new home on my own site. You can read my Easter Bunny story and others there. I hope they’ll inspire you to story your own holiday memories and significant discoveries for posterity, then share them with others.

Write now: write a holiday story of your own. Write a series of holiday stories, perhaps one for each holiday you observe.