Good. Not so plenty.

[captainsblog]

Buffalo remains a very old-school Catholic town, and so Good Friday is a much bigger deal here than I ever remember it being growing up, or in my years in Rochester. Many offices, and some courts/clerks, close or at least close early for the day; and as I drove into North Buffalo this afternoon to meet a client I could not meet at a closed office, I passed a half-dozen different parishes, from SS. Peter and Paul to St. John the Baptist in Kenmore, all with full throngs risking alternate-side parking tickets in the middle of the day.

Even the booming Easter candy business slows to a crucifixion procession of a crawl.    This town goes major gaga over chocolate for this holiday, with candy shops doing their biggest business of the year and a local manufacturer renting storefronts to pass out the bunnies. Most of them have employees in pastel Easter Bunny costumes who ply the sidewalks out in front of these stores, stylin' for the passing traffic. (I first encountered one of these in law school and almost got into a car accident when a driver was distracted by her "LOOK MOMMY!" toddler and almost plowed into me.)

Today, the Niagara Candy outlet closest to us was open, but Bunnykins was missing. Several others in my travels were out and about despite the gloom and doom of today's observance, and toward the end of the day, I got riffing at my bank about a hypothetical throwdown between the dueling rabbits of Niagara Candy and Sweet Jenny's:

Yo Jennufuh! Your chocolate eggs taste like pellets!

Hey Viagra Candy! Yo momma multiplies like rabbits- with me!

It's gonna be so much more fun in hell, yaknow....

Comments

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

Once upon a time I never worked on Good Friday. I was in the church in the wee sma' hours of Friday morning keeping vigil ("Would you not watch with me one hour?"). The church was stripped after the Maundy Thursday service of everything that made it a church, and anything that could not be carried out was shrouded in black. Friday evening was the service I always led, a kind of Tenebrae that ended in darkness and silence. God is dead. Then we'd bust loose on Saturday nigh with a huge extravaganza with all the trimmings.

Episcopalians are just as histrionic as holy rollers, they're just a little quieter.

On my way down to the Cape this evening, I stopped off at the Market Basket just over the bridge. One of the store managers was wearing a garish silk-screened tie showing the dark hill of Gethsamane against a lurid sunset with the words from John 3:16 - the whole verse - superimposed in letters big enough to read from half an aisle away.

As for me, after writing some horrid godless essay in which I'll make mockery of the Gospel and guarantee my certain damnation, I'll be off to sing two services at First Parish. We're doing the Hallelujah from the Messiah.

Happy Oestre!

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

And you're gonna do a damn fine job of it despite not believing a word.

If you're not careful, Jesus is gonna wind up sorting you with the lambs and you're gonna have a more boring eternity than the perpetual nothingness you're betting on. Just be sure to moon Him once in a while for me;)

[fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com]

Growing up I wasn't aware of the big-name manufacturer's outlets so much as I could recognize every chocolatier at the Broadway Market.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

Somehow I've never been to the Broadway Market. Butter lambs seem, I don't know, too transitory.

[fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com]

Polish grandma meant it was tradition to go every Easter. Fresh-baked rye, horseradish ground while you watched, fresh chrusciki, the best pierogis you could buy... it was heavenly.

[oxymoron67.livejournal.com]

Pittsburgh is a Catholic city at its core as well.

Things shut down on Good Friday.

Services are PACKED. (We all go up to kiss Christ's feet in a delightful early Springtime germ-sharing ritual.)

Meantime, I spent Good Friday at museums.

[lindapendant.livejournal.com]

I have always pondered the correlation between Jesus dying on the cross, arising on the third day, ascending into heaven - and people celebrating this miracle of all miracles with the purchase and consumption of chocolate bunnies and pastel coloured dyed eggs which are sometimes but not always hidden and searched for.

I eventually got used to the bunnies and the eggs; there are some things in life which will never make sense, so one just has to go with it.

Then bunnies became chocolate Transformers and Dora the Explorer and Telebubbies, and pastels became primary colours, and they've lost me now. It's just gone too far.