Tag: easter

hot x buns

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hot cross buns easter monday 2025

I bloody love a Hot Cross Bun, and you just can’t get good hot cross buns over here. You can get warm angry rolls, and you can get heated mad muffins, and you can even get burning furious beignets, but a proper hot cross bun cannot be found. There might be things that resemble them in the stores, but nothing that actually tastes like the ones we get in England. But here are some proper hot cross buns. Well they did have some colourful dried fruit in them which I can allow because that was nice, but the rest of it tasted right and was had warned up with butter on and a nice cup of tea. Those Easter-y things that I miss so much from back home, chocolate Easter Eggs, hot cross buns, the four day weekend and people complaining about other people not appearing to celebrate it, I miss those traditions. These ones were made by a British parent my wife knows (thank you they were delicious!) that made a huge batch of them. Definitely made my Easter. One of my Easter traditions is to watch The Long Good Friday on Good Friday, the old London gangster film with Bob Hoskins. It’s a great film but when you watch it in 2025 the, er, outdated terminologies are a bit, yeah. Still, some of it was filmed at Copthall swimming pool which is where I learned to swim, dive, and talk like an east end thug. I do love a hot cross bun though. When I was a kid, I used to get a lot of big chocolate eggs at Easter, there was no shortage in my house. My dad loved them. I love a Cadbury’s Creme Egg too though unlike in America, they are an all-year item in England. I have a photo of me as a baby, literally two months old (“Peter’s First Easter” my Mum had written underneath in my photo album), with my Nan where she is feeding me a Cadbury’s Creme Egg, chocolate all over my two-month-old baby face. Different time innit, they probably thought, well it’s still an egg, sure it’s healthy. I was allowed to stay home when I was a young kid on Easter Sunday when the rest of my family went to church because I didn’t go for all that stuff, and fair play to my parents for not making me, but I had to do all the hoovering and dusting and any washing up while they were out.  We would have a big Easter dinner, though often we’d have that on Easter Monday. Films like Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music were always on the TV, and of course my favourite, The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe, the old animated version which inspired me to put on a stage version when I was living in France years later. I completely missed all the religious allegories when I was a kid, and was surprised as an adult to finally make the actually obvious connections. I don’t remember any hot cross buns in it though, just some cold grumpy beavers. I’m reminded of a joke from Easter with a punchline “Hot Cross Bunnies!” but I can’t for the life of me remember the actual joke itself, one of those “what do you get if you blah blah blah blah?” jokes, and I’m happy not to actually know it, so if you remember it, please don’t tell me. I prefer living in ignorance and coming up with my own versions.

what’s the matter with you, sing me something new

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B and 8th, Easter 2018 sm

Here is another panorama, this one from Easter Sunday. This is the Davis Lutheran Church on the corner of B and 8th. B8. “B-8-iful sketch!” a passing punster might say. “B-8-a-fool” more like. Anyway I have wanted to draw this scene for ages, not so much the church which is just a regular building, not exactly Sagrada Familia, but that tree in front is incredible. I had to draw it soon; this was the start of April, which is still leaving it late, but I had to draw it when there were no leaves. It’s too leafy after that. Like this you can see the branches and the shape and yes, it was a bit tedious drawing all those branches but no, actually it was great fun. I’m glad I drew it on Easter because there’s that big cross on the lawn. There are significantly more colourful objects on the left page of this panorama than on the right. This is the way home from downtown. Nice to sketch something I have not already sketched in Davis. There are still one or two things left to draw, I guess.

Week Twenty-Nine: Eggciting Times

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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!