Easter at a heathen’s house is always interesting. We explain none of the religious significance and the holiday becomes all about spring as personified by bunny rabbits, lambs, chicks, eggs, and candy.
The past two years we’ve taken the Unreliable Narrator to the Natural History Museum’s butterfly exhibit. This year, friends of ours from the Pacific NW were in Palm Springs attending a sporting event and we decided to join them and also hang out with one of the mamas from my mom’s group who has a gorgeous vacation home out there.
We stayed at a big family-friendly (code word for **cough**run by Mormons**cough**) hotel chain/resort. It’s a vast square of desert land appallingly green with golf courses, tennis courts, sprinklers blasting on in the evenings, swimming pools, and other ecological disasters–the hotel and villas are designed to be time-shares, or condos, or short-term stays. Whatever your heart desires, we can find a financing option for you!
(Need I say I ordinarily find Palm Springs a bit scary? It’s a freaking desert. What are the water-sucking golf courses and effing fountains doing EVERYWHERE? And the plastic surgery! Lady, you should demand your money back because I think your ears meet around the back of your head and jut out like the handle on a mug.)
Now, normally I think: Oh, faceless hotel chain, no biggie. We go and enjoy the pool, see our friends, scooter around (we do lots of that), the end. Nothing special.
Well, it turns out we receive a booklet directly after check-in that details a four-day long extravaganza of kid revelry that is FREE to all guests of the hotel.
I kid you not, they had lined up visits from a reptile museum, cupcake decorating, pony rides, a petting zoo, evening movie-watching for kids from the swimming pool, a BMX trick bike show, an organized Easter egg hunt, raffles of Easter baskets, and–get this:
The Easter bunny parachuting out of a plane onto the lawn to start off the egg hunt.
Now when you’re a child and you hear that, you fling your arms up into the air and shout out, WOO-HOO, I AM FILLED WITH AWESOME! BECAUSE THAT WILL BE SOOOOOO COOL!!
And when you’re a crusty, jaded, cynical grownup whose mind is swiss-cheesed with curdled thoughts like College Costs How Much? and Damn, He’s Too Energetic, We Should Never Have Given Him Mashed Grass-Fed Organic Antibiotic-Free New Zealand Beef When He Was Baby That Required First Class Airfare to Get to Our Humble Kitchen Based on the Price We Paid For It; and Those Easter Activities Are Free? No, They Are Just Pre-Paid Because the Hotel Room Cost Enough, He Will Go and Enjoy Every Single One of Them Whether He Wants to Or Not… well, you naturally make a calculation and say to each other, “No way, it’s probably a stuffed rabbit toy that falls out of a model airplane.”
Because there’s no way an actual human in a bunny suit will parachute out of a real airplane of some kind. That’s just too expensive. How mean to get kids’ hopes up like that. I gotta see this. For real.
You see how crusty and hobbled by petty concerns our grownup minds are? There is just no room for magic whatsoever.
Sure enough, there was cupcake decorating.
There was iguana wrassling.
Snake charming.
Turtle poking.
Pony riding.
Baby duckling cuddling.
And yes, the Easter bunny parachuting out of an airplane.* With a rainbow parachute that he could maneuver to do tricks.**
No lie–as he fell toward earth, he swooped and did flips and weaves. He steered nimbly and veered between palm trees. And he came in so fast, my camera, which was still on telephoto setting because I’m all automatic for the peephole like that, was set up totally wrong to catch his final descent.
And of course, there was an Easter egg hunt, where innocent children were coached in the ways of acquisitive American capitalism by their parents, who fully expected them to come back with as many eggs as they could gather. Preferably filling more than one bag per child, if not outright assisted by their parents. (People! What is wrong with you? Can your child not be greedy and acquisitive in some weird perversion of Darwinistic aptitude without your help? Because if they amass a thousand plastic eggs filled with ha’penny tchochkes due to your acquisitiveness, then it’s not really a proper test of Darwinistic ability in your child, is it?)
We marveled over the strange habits and customs of parents with small children with our childless friends at dinner. We splashed happily in the politically incorrect but oh-so-fantastic kiddie pool at our friend’s house in the desert. HB and the Unreliable Narrator went for a couple of bike rides and an epic 3.5 mile scooter ride, during which they saw much desert flora.
Summing up our time in Palm Springs, the Unreliable Narrator declared, “I’m very interested in cactus.”
In short, a good time was had by all.
* Selected pictures of which will appear in time for Wordless Wednesday. Because I’m lazy/busy like that.
**Only in L.A. does the movie stuntman decide to pick up a few quick bucks jumping out of an airplane in a white bunny suit and makeup on Easter weekend.
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