The Sun has come out, after record Californian rainfall, and Spring is well and truly in the air. The once sun-crisp brown hills and fields of northern California are now alive and green, while the mountains are still thick with snow, and the rivers full to overflowing. Pete has begun murdering all spiders that look even remotely like a widow or a recluse (“execute Order 66”), and the Easter Bunny has been defying his asbo and bringing baskets of colourful eggs to all. The White House has been holding its annual Easter Egg Hunt, though despite the President’s insistence that there were mobile chicken pens and painting equipment on the White House lawn, the UN teams of specialist toddlers have yet to find any evidence of coloured eggs.

Easter is slightly different here than in Britain. For one thing, they don’t get Good Friday off work, nor Easter Monday. Secondly, they don’t have the big hollow chocolate Easter Eggs so common in the UK. Thirdly – and this one I really missed – they don’t have Hot Cross Buns. Here in the US it is the custom to give big Easter Baskets, stuffed with colourful candies, little chocolate eggs and other sweet goodies; moreover, the art of painting eggs is more popular here than in Britain (I just draw eyes on them). There has been a recent trend, however, to rebrand Easter as the sterile “Spring Holiday”, with terms such as “Good Friday” being seen as too offensively unsecular. Personally I like the name my brother-in-law Kris gives Easter, “Zombie Jesus Day”. Now, where shall I draw the parallel with the Zombie Jesus and the Church’s long history of eating people’s brains..?

Every holiday here has its associated colours. Christmas has red and green, Thanksgiving has brown and orange, 4th of July has red, white and blue; Easter has, well, pastel colours. Yellows, light greens, a bit of soft pink, maybe a touch of pale blue. It’s a very wimpy holiday, colour-wise, as if it can’t really make its mind up. Cards show baby rabbits and newly hatched chicks, rather than bloody nails and splintered wood, surely the true spirit of Easter. What would Jesus do? I don’t know, but I know if he were alive in today’s America, he would probably be deported because of his Mexican-sounding name. And so, to close this week’s entry, I’d just like to point out (in my best Cockney rhyming slang) that as long as Bush is in office, there will always be a bunch of easter egg hunts at the White House. Happy Vernal Equinox!