My Easter Bonnet
Pandemic Diary Day 19
April 12, 2020 — Easter Sunday
After yesterday’s diary entry, my mother suggested we all wear Easter bonnets to cover our uncoiffed mops.
What a great idea! My friend Melanie D. has always donned an Easter bonnet and I always look forward to her creations, but in this time of SIP, I can only look forward to her Facebook post this year.
The Easter bonnet was originally a European tradition. New clothes and hats were first a symbol of the coming of spring and a fresh start and later became a symbol of Easter. The first bonnets were circles of leaves and flowers to show the cycle of the seasons.
Poor Robin, an 18th-century English almanac maker wrote: At Easter let your clothes be new. Or else be sure you will it rue.
The Easter bonnet caught on in the US after the Civil War primarily due to the first Easter Parade in New York City which occurred in the 1870s. But it wasn’t really until Irving Berlins 1933 song The Easter Parade that the Easter Bonnet took off, peaking in the 1940s.
In your Easter bonnet
with all the frills upon it,
You’ll be the grandest lady in the Easter parade
In 1948 Irving Berlin’s film, Easter Parade, starring Judy Garland and Fred Astaire helped to further popularize the tradition.
It is an interesting thought game that during tough times in United States’ history, such as the Great Depression, a new Easter bonnet was a simple luxury to be cherished. Maybe that will be the same for this crisis, time to pull out the fixings and begin to decorate our hats.
If you have been reading this diary long enough, you know my Easter weakness is Peeps. But did you know that Americans buy more than 700 million marshmallow Peeps during Easter? This makes Peeps the most popular non-chocolate Easter candy.
Also Americans consume more than 16 million jelly beans during this holiday. That is enough jelly beans to circle the globe three times.
Of course we all know this candy comes from the Easter Bunny. The idea of the Easter bunny giving candies and eggs is said to have originated in Germany during the middle ages.
An old fashioned word in the song Easter Parade is Rotogravure. The original process is gravure printing, but the newspapers developed a variation known as rotogravure; this latter term became somewhat synonymous with a section of the newspaper. Thus “On the Avenue…Fifth Avenue…The photographers will snap us…And you’ll find that you’re…In the rotogravure”
Trivial Things
My Horoscope for today: You better believe your basket contains a golden egg. Crack that sucker and you’ll discover an astral zap of inspiration, ambition and energy.
The NYT Crossword Puzzle: A good accompaniment to a Cup of Joe
San Francisco weather: 57 degrees and partly cloudy
NYSE closed
Italian word of the day: Pasqua (Easter)
Spanish word of the day: energético (energy)
OED word of the day: locuplete
Days under Shelter In Place: 30
Reading: Why Does the World Exist by Jim Holt
Reading Canto XVI, XVII, XVIII of Dante’s Inferno
Something Special: The Easter bunny who sent their proxies (my adorable neighbors Daniel and Jasmine) Delivered Easter eggs this morning.
My Black and White Picture of the Day
Something Silly From the Internet: · I need to practice social-distancing… from the refrigerator.
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