I wrote this a number of years ago, but it is still fitting. The memories still make me smile.

Coming home with a bag of hot cross buns from the grocery store. I bit into one, and frowned as the bland, dry mass moved around my mouth. Of course I compared it to the hot cross buns my mother made when we were children.

My memories of Easter are always of hot cross buns and pickled fish – home-made of course – served for lunch on Friday. Try as we might, we could not persuade my mother that yes, they were both connected to Easter, but that didn’t mean you had to eat them together.

Easter usually connected to a week of school holidays in South Africa, and that meant Mota Bhaji and his family came to visit, all the way from Vryburg.  Mota Bhaji was what we called my father’s eldest brother, and they lived in a mysterious, far-away place called Vryburg. At Easter they’d come up to Johannesburg where we lived, and they’d stay with my aunty, who lived just two doors away. Out of town visitors meant more friends than just the usual cousins that we played with all the time. It also meant a definite slackening of the rules. We could go over and play with my cousins ALL DAY LONG. There was also a great likelihood of at least one late night of our parents visiting. As long as the adults visited, we could continue to play outside long after dark without ever being checked on. There was nothing as crushing as hearing my father call for us because it was time to go home. There was never a time when we’d played enough and were ready to go home. Never.

During the day we played ball games or played in the veldt across the street. I don’t even know if there were games, or if it was just the delight of being together that made us all giddy with excitement. At night our favourite game was “sitosi” – pretty much hide-and-seek, but it seemed far more exciting being played in the dark with cousins you didn’t see all the time. There were a few Easters when we also had cousins from Canada visit.  Having so many cousins around was almost too exciting to bear!

Sometimes we’d go indoors and join the grown-ups. Mota Bhaji was always known for his jokes. Many were wonderfully cheesy, and even the little cousins got them and we laughed until our bellies ached. Every now and again, there’d be a somewhat colourful joke. I never got the grown-up jokes, but when my grandmother tried to stifle her giggles and pretend to scold her adult son, I knew I was missing something. All the older cousins laughed, some of the younger ones laughed a little too loudly as they pretended to get the joke. I hated being one of the little ones that all shared the same blank expression.  

The other thing I remember about Easter is the awful chocolate. There were chocolate trains and chocolate animals, but it wasn’t even chocolate. It was this nasty chocolate-flavoured candy – and it tasted awful. My mother would always buy the “chocolate”, and do a poor job of hiding it. My candy-fiend brother, Ismail would find the stash and dig in.  Then my mother would discover this infraction and the chocolate would come out and the surprise was ruined. The display side was usually intact, and the rear side would have been eaten away.

It was never really a surprise since we knew there would be chocolate.  I kept waiting year after year, for the magical presentation of the Easter chocolate on Sunday morning. But no, every year, every single year, Ismail would ruin the surprise by getting in on the chocolate too early. I don’t even know if my mother ever had a plan for a big presentation, or if her plan only went as far as the poor hiding spot.  Ismail was after all her favourite child.