I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends

Briton: I love watching what you choose to get excited about. It's so unpredictable.
Me: There's no rhyme or reason (or something to that effect).

Some holidays/birthdays I brush off with nary a trace of sentimentality. It could be any other day as far as I'm concerned. But then, for no explicable reason, there are other times when I go all out. This Easter I pulled out all stops (well, almost all of them) to make Easter dinner "count". Since I lack an inherent gene for how to make something count and haven't acquired a vast database of how-to's and what-nots, it was necessary to lean on the expertise of the More Knowledgeable on how to go about an Easter Dinner.

The menu was pulled from melskitchencafe. Jo and I salivated over her food pictures and decided on not one, but two desserts. We did have the traditional ham, potatoes, hot veggies, rolls, fruit salad, detail, detail, detail. And then Jeff volunteered to make ....

Cedar (seder ... ha ha ha) Plank Salmon.

Oh, my, it was gooood. It was way more delicious to eat than it was apparently pleasant to grill. (I appreciate that Jeff is wearing a loincloth in this picture. To be modest.)

Besides all-out food, we needed a fancy table setting. Who else to turn to for advice than Dear Alisha? She hammered me with all sorts of links and suggestions and generously lent her linen napkins (which I don't think anybody dared to actually use ... ruffians!) and offered servingware, etc.

The place cards were from one of her suggested links:


Hilary took these photos:
Sometimes at Downtown Arby's, they don't use knives or matching silverware or press their linens. It's considered shabby chic.

And again in color!
Wanna know how to make the jellybean vases? That was Alisha's idea. And Briton was the gopher late on Saturday night to find the beans.

Did you also notice the birds' nests with color-coordinated chocolate eggs in them? How could you miss them?! Martha Stewart. Yep. Stewart. And Briton. Same late-night, 3-grocery-store run for the eggs.



I swiped the cluttered family photos off the Museum shelf and replaced with some flower arrangements. I thought up the sheared heather in the trifle bowl all by my own brainsome. It was just a whim, a fancy, as I strolled through the yard on that beautiful Easter Sunday afternoon. Note: the centerpieces got thrown onto this shelf about 2 seconds into dinner because you couldn't see the person across from you, what fer all the foliage.


White blossoms and cherry blossoms and daffodils all stolen from the neighbors (which I'm counting as friends in this post title).

Then Briton and Jolynn were on deck. Briton was in charge of the kids' treat/craft. He made cupcakes and was thinking of having them decorate them into bunnies. But in the middle of stake conference he was hit with an Eureka!

He ended up telling the Easter story, using the leftover cupcake batter that he'd made into a round cake as the "stone" over the shoebox tomb. He engineered paper people of all the characters in the story that each kid got to play the part of/color. The kids really got into it. Clara was Mary and ended up decapitating her. But other than that it was relatively reverent.


Then he handed out the cupcakes as miniature "stones" for the kids.


Jo Lynn told the Easter story using Easter eggs with an item in each one that represented part of the story -- like a sprig of rose thorns for the crown, a tiny scrap of white cloth for the burial clothes. And the last egg was empty. There was a scripture for each item, and as she read it, each kid got to open their egg in turn. Pretty fancy stuff. It was a great Easter day.

For the record, though, we still did not give our kids Easter baskets.