Happy Holiday(s)

I am too lazy to check, but I am assuming that about a third of the world's Christians celebrated Easter today. I remember growing up how I loved this time of year: lots of matzos and shallet eggs (they were colored after all), sometimes matzo-ball soup, occasionaly even gefilte-fish...and out Easter guests never knew or even suspected that this was most definitely not Easter food. Jewish food for Christian holidays - that was the specialty of our house, and those who did not need to know never learned about it.

If you live in the West, you are likely well versed in the fine differences between various Protestant denominations and Catholicism. You may not even think about Eastern Orthodoxy. If you hear the word "schism" you may think about Luther. But if you live in the East, The Schism was in the eleventh century (if I can remember my middle-school history) when both Christianity and the Roman Empire split into two halves: East and West.

If you live in the East, everything that is not Orthodox comes under the heading "catholic" - not much understanding or interest into the later divisions of the Catholic Church. Thus, December 25th is "Catholic Christmas" and nobody remembers about the existence of Protestantism. Who cares, anyway, if this new heretical cult, the Catholicism, spawned its own offspring heretical cults. Pope is a false prophet by definition, so all this hullaballoo about the election of the new Pope must have been greeted with mild bemusement at best in about a third of world's Christianity.

Just to put it all into perspective....

Anyway, much more importantly, today is May Day. So, Happy May Day! I don't know what they do these days in the old country, but when I was growing up, they always somehow managed to make the May Day weekend something like nine days long: long enough for the first big trip of the summer. Perhaps still too chilly for the seaside, too late for skiing, but countryside looks great at this time of the year. This was also usually the beginning of the show-jumping season, so I would take off to various horse shows around the country.

One year it snowed for May Day weekend, ugly wet snow. Of course, as Murphy's Law predicts, that was the year when my brother had to go for some military exercises. When he came back all he said is that he never knew there were so many different kinds of mud or that they could all be found in the same ditch he dug up. Predictably, as soon as he came back, summer started, just a few days too late for him.