Easter, for some, is a sacred and religious day. For me, not so much. Like Thanksgiving, I see Easter as being a day to bring your family together, enjoy a good meal and reconnect.

What I remember from childhood was a house bursting with children and adults, family and friends. “The Red House”, as it was coined many years ago, is a two-storey red farmhouse built by my great-grandfather in the early 1900’s. Generations have come and gone, and when I was a child, my grandmother and her sister lived there together. This was the site of many Easters and Christmas Eves, and as I was making strawberry cupcakes for my own Easter this year, the luscious smell of fresh strawberries took me back to those gatherings gone by.

Every year my grandmother would pile fresh strawberries on a glass cake pedestal, all surrounding a small bowl of powdered sugar. That was it. Strawberries and sugar. So simple, so enough. Small hands and faces would be dusted in powdered sugar all day long, as the pile of strawberries seemed to be magically endless.

I also remember hunting Easter eggs before any food was consumed. There were nine of us grandchildren for most of my childhood, and after hunting all of the eggs, my grandmother would have us line up out the front door in an orderly fashion, and she would come along and take two eggs from each of us for deviled eggs and potato salad. We were never happy about this, after all, we just worked so hard to find them! But it was Grams, and you didn’t argue.

*photo courtesy of https://pixabay.com/en/strawberry-strawberries-fruit-food-2460078/