Easter is looming. When is it going to get here exacty? I don’t know. Who can say? The pope? The Easter Bunny? Probably.
Easter is the only New Zealand public holiday dictated by the lunar calendar. It’s a celebration of promiscuous rabbits and chocolate eggs, of winter releasing its hold on the frozen soil, of green shoots, and new life. Except of course, it’s not. It’s autumn here in Aotearoa and as always, our holidays are arse-backwards and make no sense to anyone living south of Somalia.
There is one consolation for this hemispherically nonsensical season: hot cross buns. Perhaps its the years of antipodean conditioning talking, but there is something deeply autumnal about the smell of spiced bread on a cold, clear morning, mingling with the faint aroma of wood smoke from neighbouring chimneys. The hue of the glaze echoes the colours of the turning leaves and the dried fruit bids a fitting farewell to the fresh produce of summer and ushers in the season of rich, sweet preserves.
So, thank Christ for hot cross buns. Or rather, don’t.
It’s natural to assume that the icing crosses that give these baked treats their name was put there by pious Christians keen to commemorate the brutal torture and subsequent rebirth of their man, Jesus of Nazareth. But no. As with Christmas, the church simply rocked up to an already existing pagan holiday, spread out their beach towels, and commenced insisting that they had in fact been there all along.
The Saxons, those mobile Germans who blessed us anglophones with all our very best swears, ate buns marked with crosses in honour of Eostre, goddess of spring or light. Druids, Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans are all recorded as indulging in similar practices. Some of the sacred “cakes” were marked with the image of deer or ox horns, and others a cross, signifying the four quarters of the moon.
In my house, the weekend following the first full moon on or after the autumn equinox is a rare time of peace. I am a cinnamon agnostic, whereas my partner and my oldest son are both Americans and feel the same way about cinnamon as I do about butter, that is, it goes with everything and the more of it the better. Porridge (or ‘oatmeal’) is a particular sore spot. And so, the sweet, some would say cloying, smell of cinnamon lingers in our kitchen all year round. Which I tend to take as an affront to everything I hold sacred and serves as a constant reminder that I share a house with two subversive and potentially dangerous foreigners.
The smell of hot cross buns toasting (or gently ‘heated but not toasted’ as my eight-year-old insists upon) provide cinnamon with a vehicle that, for once, brings unity rather than division to a fractured household. The fact that butter can be so liberally called upon as an ally makes for an even more joyous occasion of atonement.
Forget Christmas: Easter is the season of peace and goodwill to all men, women, and children.
Enjoy your hot cross bun folks. They provide a rich link to a pre-Christian past, they are delicious, they go well with butter, and they make a reasonable amount of sense in the autumn.
Just don’t eat them after Easter Sunday, you horrible heathens.
Photo by Casey Lovegrove on Unsplash
