The Commonplace: Edition Three
One Hundred Lovely Things To Do Over the Easter Weekend
Read Edition One Here. | Read Edition 2 Here |
Most women arrive at Easter the same way they arrive at everything: slightly unprepared, quietly hopeful, and carrying more than they meant to. It feels compicated and weighted with sweet expectation. The way the long weekend sits there with its unusual permission, no ordinary weekend logic applies, no productivity is expected, the shops kee funny hours and the diary is briefly empty, so most of us fill it with chocolate and family obligation and entirely miss what it is quietly offering.
Which is this: four days at the hinge of the year. Winter releasing its grip with visible reluctance. The light doing something it hasn’t done since October. The body remembering, without being told, that it is animal and seasonal and subject to forces considerably older than any of us.
This week, The Commonplace turns its attention to the Easter that belongs to messy women who have stopped performing spring and started inhabiting it. Who know by now that a long weekend is not a gap in real life but a form of real life in itsef, and that how you choose to fill it is a quiet statement of values. One hundred things. Films worth watching, poems worth reading, recipes worth making, rituals borrowed from cultures that still know how to mark a season, small practical beauty rooted in the belief that how you tend to your house and your body and your attention is a form of philosophy. Some entries are serious. Some are an instruction to eat chocolate and sup wine before anyone else is awake and feel absolutely no remorse about it.
This is not a list for the woman who wants a productive Easter. It is a list for the woman who wants one stuffed with meaning.
The first twenty-five are free, for everyone. The remaining seventy-five are for my paid subscribers, the women who have decided that a weekly act of gathering is worth the small cost of keeping it going. If you would like to come inside, you know where to find the door.
No.3: Easter, the BrocanteHome way
1. Dye eggs using red onion skins simmered for an hour, they will come out the colour of old garnets…
2. When I was a little girl, a new dress for Easter Sunday was almost law. This weekend treat yourself to something that makes you feel fresh and pretty.
3. LISTEN: to Bach’s St Matthew Passion, all of it, (or just the opening chorus), on Good Friday evening
4. BAKE: a Greek tsoureki, the braided Easter bread scented with mastic and mahlab, even if it takes all morning
5. READ: "Let Evening Come" by Jane Kenyon, for Good Friday rather than Sunday. because Kenyon is the poet of the domestic ordinary made sacred, and this one is quietly devastating.
6. READ: Begin Good Friday with The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy and coffee drunk from a bowl. Paris, appetite, female mischief and bad decisions.
7. Blow an egg clean and write one true thing you wish to let go of on its shell, then bury it. Make it an annual ritual.
8. On Saturday head out in search of a good baguette, then spread it thickly with salted Breton butter, and eat it reading something wonderful.
9. Find a yellow gingham anything.
10. Decant your olive oil into a small jug with a sprig of thyme inside. Make a habit of including it at every table for drizzling on bread.
11. Make saffron butter by working a pinch into softened salted butter: scrumptious on new potatoes on Easter Sunday.
12. Plant something in a pot on Good Friday, an old European tradition for strong growth.
13. Arrange dyed eggs in a shallow bowl of dried lavender for a centrepiece that speaks of Spring.
14. Make a lunch of radishes, butter, bread, and soft cheese and read a chapter of French Country Cooking by Mimi Thorisson. Then lose the afternoon dreaming.
15. Wear red on Good Friday as a quiet nod to the old tradition of wearing it in parts of southern Europe.
16. EAT: Source a very good piece of aged Comte and eat it with a pear and nothing else for lunch one day. Teach yourself to appreciate the exquisite, slowly and patiently.
17. Make a warm compress of chamomile tea bags and rest it over your eyes for ten minutes.
18. RITUAL: Learn about the Hungarian locsolkodas, the Easter Monday sprinkling of he womenfolk, and do a tiny version with flower water.
19. Go through your linen cupboard and refold everything, pulling out each piece and shaking before making it neat again: a domestic act with an inexplicably calming effect.
20. Put a small dish of salt near your front door on Good Friday, a purifying household blessing from old German custom.
21. READ: "Won't you celebrate with me" by Lucille Clifton - a woman taking stock of what she has survived and deciding that survival is worth celebrating. Perfect for Easter Sunday.
22. Write a recipe card for a dish you make from memory and decorate the edges with ribbons and Easter eggs.
23. Stir rose harissa into a yoghurt sauce and serve it with whatever roasted vegetable you have. Fragrant bliss.
24. Open a bottle of orange wine and drink a glass before anyone else is awake. Consider it the all grown-up woman’s equivalent of having an Easter egg for breakfast. I won’t tell if you won’t.
25. LISTEN: to Hildegard von Bingen, “A Feather on the Breath of God”, preferably the Gothic Voices recording. Twelfth-century sacred music by a woman who was also a herbalist, a visionary, and an abbess. Perfect for Good Friday.
