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Easter Celebrations Remembered in Brooklyn, New York

A couple of years ago I wrote a pretty concise article for Searchwarp about Easter and when this assignment came and I accepted it I thought, for several days, what in the world could I write about that was more, different or explained Easter better than my last article. I was stumped, at least until I thought about my Easter childhood days.

73 years ago I came into the world as a child coming out of the "great depression". We were poor along with most of the rest of the Americans in this country. That year was 1935 and I was about 3 or 4 years old when my memory stated to kick in.

Though the adults in our family went to church spasmodically all the kids went to Sunday school regularly at whatever church was nearby. I remember Easter celebrations at Methodist, Congregational, Presbyterian, eventually Episcopalian and often the Salvation Army Sunday school classes whenever we stayed at my maternal grandmother’s home in Brooklyn. However, on Easter and Christmas it seemed that every adult in our family went to one of these services.

Coming from a poor family meant that were was not an abundance of every thing and especially clothing. Many of it was hand-me-down from older siblings and cousins and almost all was seasonal. I remember having a school dress, a Sunday dress and a play dress and one never mixed them up. Even these graduated down the levels as they wore out.

The one thing I do remember was we always seemed to be able to get a new Easter outfit each year and that would be that year’s Sunday dress, gradually moving through the scale to a play dress unless it was outgrown and then it was passed on to a sibling or a cousin.

For the girls that Easter outfit often included a new coat, a new pair of patent leather "Mary Jane" shoes and always included an Easter bonnet or hat and a pair of white cotton gloves. If we were really flush then that Easter outfit included a little patent leather hand bag or purse to match the shoes. The hat was rarely worn any other time except on Sundays and occasionally the shoes and hat were added if we were going to something special like a wedding, funeral or whatever. The boys were given a similar assortment of new clothes sans the gloves and included a small fedora or cap of some kind.

Growing up in New York and especially Brooklyn in those days was really exciting for me as a kid because there was not a lot of exciting things to do and this was one of the three big holidays in my life which also included Thanksgiving and Christmas. As we got older we were also included in New Year’s Eve, but that was not considered a serious holiday in our world.

Besides the clothes we received for Easter, which basically often was the only new clothes we received each year there was the Easter feast which usually consisted of ham, yams, mashed potatoes, and spring asparagus. Plus a day or two before Easter us kids got to color a whole bunch of Easter eggs which were hard boiled eggs and they were usually the centerpiece for the family table or were added to the kid’s Easter baskets. However, the best part for us kids was the Easter baskets filled with paper grass, hard boiled eggs, jelly beans, marshmallow peeps and of course a large hollow chocolate egg or bunny and some smaller solid chocolate ones as we started to leave the lean years.

By the time I was eleven or twelve I could really get around Brooklyn and parts of New York by myself or with my younger brother and sister or cousins and we explored every place safely in those days. We did a lot of walking plus we rode the elevator or subway trains and we always seemed to be able to get to where we wanted to go. Many times we ventured pretty far a field and one of our great adventures that Easter was when all us kids, dressed up in our Easter finery, decided to join the 5th Ave. Easter Parade!

We saw some great outfits as people took their Easter Stroll hoping to be photographed by one of the newspapers or magazines for their Easter Section Special. Women wore wonderful hats and many men sported top hats. However, the best thing we saw that day was a woman in her Easter finery strolling down the avenue complete with a Leopard on a lease! Wow! We kids were in awe of this sight and we kids could not wait to get back to Brooklyn to tell all our relatives, at Easter dinner, about that lady and her leopard.