I should have bought a ham!

My husband came home from Costco the Saturday before Easter- telling me what a mad house it was with everyone buying a last minute ham...because the blue laws in Minnesota mean that (for some reason) EVERYTHING is closed on Easter.

It's freakin' amazing.  You will only find some gas stations, the movies, and the 24-hour pharmacy open here.  Coming from California, it still amazes me how life screeches to a halt because of some religious holiday that a decreasing number of people celebrate (that is from studies done by Thrivent Financial showing that church attendance is down to about 60% of the volume that went in the 80s).

I find that I am growing increasingly more comfortable with the fact that I am not a Xian and I don't need to pretend to be one....especially since a decreasing number of people care about it...and the majority of those (90+%) are over the age of 60.

But, regardless, life in Minnesota stops on Easter.

As we've been approaching the Easter holiday this year, I've been pondering a few things:

1. Why is Easter on the Hebrew calendar?  They don't believe that Jesus was the son of god.  This puzzles me.

2. Why is ham eaten on Easter?  Jews don't eat ham - a point which my LA-born mother was always quick to point out when my sister refused to eat ham as proof that we really must be Jewish.

This last item really baffles me, though. I wondered if perhaps ham was eaten on Easter by Xians just to piss off the Jews.  I kept coming back to this item as a real possibility...so I had to look up the origin of the Easter ham.

Well:

It turns out it's PAGAN!  HA!

Now, pagan is just "non-Judeo-Christian", which means that Buddhists, Muslims, Ba'hai, and Wiccans- they're all pagans.  It's become a near swear word for Xians because they don't know what it means.

So, I find this tidbit of information EVEN MORE hillarious.  It turns out that there's some myth/story about a queen named Ishtar (which several Xian sites incorrectly claim is the source of the word "Easter".  It's not- it's actually a bastardization of the ancient Germanic word "Oster").  Anyhoo, Ishtar had a son that was killed by a boar and so she got sad for about 40 days- didn't eat, this became the source of Lent, and then she celebrated by eating the pig that killed her son.

That's it.

That's the source of the Easter ham.

Aren't you glad you asked?

I just wish I had actually bought one.  I guess I will from now on!

LOL