A tale of two Easters

Nate and I often times have a little bit of a challenge with holidays and our extended families and trying to make sure we spend time with all of them which usually leads to us being spread quite thin. However, when it comes to Easter, we have a unique situation that usually works out quite well for us.

Nate's Grandpa Pete, his mom's father, is Russian Orthodox. For the most part, the Orthodox calendar is slightly different from our Christian calendar. Therefore, their Easter is usually celebrated a week or two after our Christian Easter. Once every four or so years it will be the same day, but it doesn't happen too frequently. This works out well for us, we spend Christian Easter with my side of the family and then Russian Easter with his.

I remember my first Russian Easter still. We'd been dating about a year at that point and really weren't too concerned about sharing holidays yet - I usually went with my family and he with his since we were still teenagers living under our parents roofs. But after we'd been together about a year, Nate invited me to join him for Russian Easter. Since it was one of the years it fell separately from Christian Easter I agreed to attend.

I was so nervous, this was not actually my first time meeting his extended family, but probably the first time I spent an longer period of time with them. I was also nervous because I was at the time a very, very picky eater (I have improved SO much in that area in the last 10 or so years!) and feared what kinds of more ethnic type food I could expect. Nate kept throwing around these Russian terms and I'm like, hmm, what am I getting myself into.

I was pleasantly surprised! There was ham, sausage, rolls, breads and as for the more "ethnic" type stuff? I actually liked some of that too! Let me tell you, his family puts out quite a spread, you'll never walk away hungry, Grandma Dolly will make certain you do not.

His aunt had an Easter egg hunt for all us teens and 20 somethings which was a blast, the eggs had candy inside and some of them had money! I found one with a five dollar bill inside! We've continued to do that each year even though we keep getting older. She usually does a little kid one but still has one for us too. So my nerves went away completely as I realized, it really isn't that different from my Easter, it's just on another day. I've been going to both Easters ever since.

Now that I've been to nearly 10 Russian Easters, I'm very thankful that we get to experience two Easters in one year. It is the one holiday we don't have to really overplan for how we're going to get to see everyone or say "well we did this with this part of the family last year so we should trade off" etc.

We'll be celebrating Russian Easter this coming Sunday and I'm really looking forward to it!

We've been blessed with big families and I try to always look at it as a blessing, instead of a headache. I wouldn't have it any other way!