Stories

Everything New for Easter

By Natacha Sanz-Caballero

“Mom, did you get the pink bow to match my new dress?” I asked as I walked into the house after school.

Two more days and it would be Easter Sunday! For weeks I’d felt as if it would never come. I’d given up chocolate, my favorite, for Lent. This week had been the hardest. The display of chocolate Easter bunnies at the grocery store hadn’t helped. Forty days was a long time. Lent was too hard!

“I’m sorry, Haley. I’m afraid I forgot to pick it up at the store,” Mom said. “I’ll try to get it tomorrow.”

“Please, Mom, don’t forget,” I pleaded. After all these weeks, I had to be ready for Easter Sunday.

“I’ll try, but I can’t promise. I told Aunt Jeannie I’d help her cook for her Easter brunch,” Mom said.

“But Mom, Easter Sunday is only two days away! I need a new bow!” I cried.

“Haley, I am sure God won’t mind if you’re not wearing all new things on Easter Sunday. It is a nice tradition, but remember, we celebrate Christ’s resurrection and new life. That’s what’s important,” Mom said.

Yeah, yeah, I knew that. We’d been talking about it for weeks at Religious Education class. Father Steven had been talking about it at Mass, too. Mass, by the way, hadn’t been the same. We didn’t sing as many songs as we did at any other time of the year. The altar was bare. Why did Lent have to be so boring?

The next morning I decided to get my clothes ready for Easter.

“Haley, look what I made!” Julia said as she came into my room, holding up a piece of paper with some yellow blotches on it. “It’s Jesus.”

“It’s just a big blot of paint,” I snapped.

“But it’s Jesus! Don’t you see how he’s come back to life? He’s happy!” Julia said.

“It doesn’t look anything like Jesus or anyone else,” I said. I didn’t have time for my little sister’s pictures right now. I had more important things to think about.

Just then I heard the garage door open.

“Mom, did you get the bow?”

“I’m sorry, Haley. I only had time to go to the grocery store. Let me get started on the appetizers for brunch. Then we can go to the store together,” Mom said.

Just then, Julia walked out of my room, holding an empty cup of finger paint. Her shirt and hands were smudged blue. “Mommy, it was an accident,” she said, looking scared. I ran to my room and screamed. My new pink dress lay on the bed, its front splattered with blue paint. It was ruined!

“I was just trying to paint the sky!” Julia said, sobbing.

“Julia, you—you—” I was so furious I couldn’t even find the words.

“It was an accident. I’m sorry!” she said, and ran crying out of the room.

“Haley, I’m sure it will be fine,” Mom said. She carefully picked up the dress. “We can work on getting the paint off. But first I’m going to find Julia and give her a hug.”

I wanted to cry but I was too mad. Julia’s picture was on the bed. I grabbed it and headed for the wastebasket. I tossed it. It fell face up. There was a big yellow blotch in the middle of the page, surrounded by splashes of pale blue. It made me think of what Father Steven had said: Jesus is the Light.

Julia’s painting really did look like a light. How did she know? I was making all this fuss about new things that I needed for the very special day when we would celebrate Jesus’ resurrection, but Julia was the one who had really felt the significance—the joy—of it. Giving up my favorite snack hadn’t taught me much about Lent. How could I be so mean to her? I felt as small as an ant.

“I’m sorry, Julia,” I said when I found her in her room. “I shouldn’t have gotten so mad at you. This is a beautiful picture. It does look like Jesus.”

“I made it for Easter,” she said. “That’s when Jesus rises from the dead, right?”

“About two thousand years ago he did. That’s what we celebrate tomorrow,” I said.

I helped Mom clean the dress. It took a lot of washing and scrubbing, but the paint finally came off. In the afternoon I helped Mom prepare some appetizers for Aunt Jeannie’s brunch. We didn’t have time to go to the store and get a new pink bow. And you know what? It didn’t even matter.

“It looks so beautiful,” I whispered as we sat down at church on Sunday. The altar looked like a blooming garden and the air smelled like a flower shop.

“It does, and so do you in your dress,” Mom said. “It looks like it came back to life.”

Like Jesus!

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