“Gooder Friday,” I used to call it on those rare occasions, like this year when Good Friday and Passover fell on the same day. It opened a window of mutual celebration for me with my Christian friends, making it a double Good Friday. As a Jewish minority, both in the town and the school where I grew up in Virginia, I was delighted to be able to come out of isolation and celebrate with everyone else.
Even if their moms were baking ham and mine was making brisket, the fact that they were doing it on the same weekend, or even better the same day, was a cause of revelation for me.
My family observed Passover at my Aunt Helen’s house. She and Uncle Ralph lived on the second floor of a duplex. Climbing the long staircase enticed by the smells of her matzoh ball soup, I often ran into Aunt Helen’s sister who lived on the first floor. Aunt Bertha always complimented me on my dress.
Usually, I was able to wangle a new dress for the occasion which had special significance because it brought me back into that mutual celebration society. All of my friends went shopping for new fancy Easter dresses. And I could join them because, well, there were no Passover dresses.
“What color is your Easter dress?” a friend would ask me at school. “Lavender and yellow, although it’s not actually an Easter dress…” But by then no one was listening. All that mattered was that it was a festive time and we were all celebrating something.
Around Easter, my Jewish mother, a New York transplant assimilating to life in a southern suburb, would buy us a carton of chocolate marshmallow eggs and a bag of bright yellow marshmallow chickens.
When we emptied our house of bread in observance of Passover week, mom would pack matzoh in my lunches and I would explain to my schoolmates that my ancestors didn’t have time to let the bread rise before they left the desert.
“Really, your grandma lived in the desert?”
I didn’t understand the real meaning of their holiday any more than they did of mine. But it didn’t matter. I shared my matzoh and they shared their hot cross buns. It was a special time even though we observed it in different ways. And that was enough.
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