Easter

Well, it's Good Friday, so welcome to the Pony and Trap Easter Egg-stravaganza, or Sp-egg-tacular or whatever. Easter is the most rubbish holiday of the year, so let's pay tribute with a list (I do enjoy a list) of all the things that make it so very pony.

Bad puns involving the word "egg"

You see what I did there? The fucking egg puns. Have you ever seen one of these, like, in the window of Clinton Cards or somewhere (who even sends cards at Easter? Nobody fucking does. But they want you to. They make them, I've checked. But who is buying them?), something about "Egg-citement" or something, and pissed yourself laughing? Like, oh god, that tickled me, that did. It's like "excitement", but they made it say "egg", like an Easter egg. Oh, that was a good one. I'll remember that one for later down the pub. The lads will be in stitches.

I've come up with a few egg puns that could be used to advertise stuff at this time of year, but probably wouldn't be:

"Egg-stortionate prices on all our hollow chocolate shit!"
"Get s-eggs-ual thrills with the new Rampant Easter Rabbit!"
"Sweat your tits off and dance all night on Egg-stasy! Because there's no work for four days!"
"Eggs-crement!"

See, it's quite easy. Please feel free to leave your own shit Easter puns in the comments.

At least once Easter is over you don't get any more awful pun holidays until Halloween, when everything has to be "spook-tacular"...

It moves

You know where you are with all the other holidays. Same date every year. You know everything will stop happening around Christmas but that's OK, you know when it is going to be and there's plenty of warning - from September onwards you can't really go a day without a reminder somewhere. Plus it always coincides with the end of the X Factor.

Easter on the other hand moves around. It isn't always even in the same vague time span, even in the same month. I don't know whose job it is to decide on what arbitrary date it is going to be and how far in advance this is done, but I suspect, like a lot of crazy religious stuff it is done using some kind of highly Christian method like the phases of the moon.

As a result of this, and as a result of the fact Easter is shit so nobody talks about it in the weeks leading up to it, it can sometimes sneak up on you and annoy the fuck out of you. I only found out on Tuesday that it was now. That's not even a joke, or an exaggeration. I didn't even have time to make an Easter Bonnet.

The Easter Story

OK, as well as the swearing, I do do a spot of the old blasphemy as well so, er, sorry about that...

Easter is one of those fucked up Christian festivals that seems to have just sort of tacked itself on to some other thing people were already doing to celebrate some sort of natural thing, like Christmas with the longest night. It seems weirder with Easter though, somehow. On the one hand, there is all the springtime shit - eggs, bunnies, daffodils, lambs, that sort of junk. This is the main sort of imagery and symbolism that if you were to get some people to do some sort of wanky Easter "mind-map", as beloved of corporate away days everywhere, they would come up with. It's a bit primitive, I mean, eggs are pretty much a year round fixture, but it works. Celebrating the end of winter, no more of that snow and ice and shit. I can get on board with that (although spring weather is usually just rain and wind so not that much of an improvement).

But then we are reminded that the real reason for the holiday is actually nothing to do with any of that. It's a story from the Bible. It's a story that, if you are the sort of person that questions this sort of shit, starts off quite horrible and depressing and ends up just frickin' implausible. There are no bunnies or lambs gambolling in the fields, because it's fucking Jerusalem 2000 years ago (when it was probably just slightly less fucked than it is now). There is basically this Jewish guy who gets screwed over by one of his mates, who it turns out is a bit of a cunt. As a result of this the Jewish guy, who has long hair and sandals, gets humiliated and quite brutally executed - yeah, these old stories you hear at primary school are pretty delightful in how barbaric they can get, but kids love all that so it's fine - by being nailed to a big wooden cross with a couple of other local crims. That's the depressing but plausible bit.

A couple of days later he comes back to life - not like a zombie, he doesn't want to eat anybody's brain or anything, he just comes back from the dead. I think some hooker he used to knock about with finds him first or something. This is where it starts getting implausible. They actually want you to believe this really happened, it isn't just something they made up for a laugh. After some period of bodding about freaking people out about the whole being back from the dead thing, he flies up in to the sky, never to be seen again, although he was, it is safe to say, talked about quite a lot in the two millennia that followed.

It's not a bad story. I preferred Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and that episode of Doctor Who with the giant wasp that was actually a ginger vicar played by that bloke out of Game On, but it's not bad. I'd give it 6 out of 10, but it is pretty old so, you know, people were more easily entertained back in the day. Mel Gibson liked it a whole lot, at least, though I've never quite got why the whole thing was called "The Passion", that's not what I associate with the word "passion", especially in the title of a movie, at all...

The Easter Bunny

When you're a kid, if you're one of the lucky ones, there are only three entities you believe sneak into your room while you are sleeping. You've got Santa, obviously the best because he brings you the annual mother lode of all presents, the Tooth Fairy, she gives you cash but takes away your teeth for reasons unknown, so she's a bit wrong, but cash is always nice, and the Easter Bunny.

The Easter Bunny is shit. With Santa, over the years the legend has been padded out quite a lot. He's got his reindeer, his sleigh, we know what he looks like, we know he likes a drink, he lives at the North Pole with some elves who make the toys (that's right kids - the Wiis are all made by funny little short guys), and now, you can even track him on the NORAD website and Google Earth. A lot of time and effort has gone in to making what is basically quite an elaborate global lie to make it fun for the kids. But with the Easter Bunny, the adults have just gone, uh, yeah, it's a rabbit that brings you chocolate.

He hasn't even got a fucking name. What colour is he? Is he a normal sized rabbit or some kind of freaky giant Donnie Darko rabbit? Can he talk? Where does he come from? How does he get to all the children? Why does he give them eggs, when rabbits don't have anything to do with eggs? Seriously, nobody can even be bothered to fabricate him into anything, because it's that shit a concept - a magical rabbit confectioner.

Cadbury's Cream Eggs

The only Cadbury product that has a "season" (like it's vegetables and you're one of those knobs that won't eat them if they've been flown in), which is unaccountably from January (why?) to about May, after which you see them being sold off for 10p as they go past their sell by date.

They are fucking gross. That is the only word for that sickly ooze in a chocolate shell. It makes my teeth itch just thinking about it. What even is that sugary mess inside? Pure, solid diabetes in egg form?

I know someone who, for a bet, took one into a chippy and asked them to batter and fry it (he took the foil off first). He then ate it. A Glasgow style Cream Egg. For a fucking fiver. Animal.

Mini Eggs are alright though. Now they don't do those adverts with Mr Cadbury's Parrot on. He was an annoying little cunt.

The next part of the Pony and Trap Easter Egg-stravaganza, here to keep you company throughout the long (fucking interminable) weekend, is going to cover general British Bank Holiday fun... It's out there to be had, apparently.