My experience with the conservative War on Easter

We already knew conservatives had a War on Halloween, but did you know they've long had a War on Easter too?

It goes back at least to 1984 when I was in 5th grade. I attended a public elementary school at the time. My teacher was a stern disciplinarian and an old-fashioned type.

One day around Easter, she instructed us to make drawings about the holiday. I know it doesn't sound like a real mind-builder considering this was otherwise a fairly hard class, but it's a world of contradictions out there. But the teacher told the class something to the effect of, "Your drawing better have something to do with Easter's real meaning. I don't want to see bunnies and eggs. Unless your drawing is about what Easter's really about, you're not allowed doing this assignment." (Ooh, an Allowed Cloud!)

I still planned on drawing...bunnies and eggs! It wasn't to make a statement or to express disregard for religion. It was simply because that's what I felt like drawing.

My desk was right next to the teacher's desk, and I reached over and grabbed a sheet of drawing paper from her desk. When the instructor saw me starting this assignment, she reiterated her warning about "Easter's real meaning."

So I promptly placed the sheet of paper back on her desk. I'm sure she was less than pleased at that, but again, I wasn't trying to make a statement with this action either.

I'm in a hurry to get 3 entries posted on this blog today, so I can't go into too much detail about this, but in any event, this was a public school. Was it really proper for a public school teacher to lecture students about what she considered "Easter's real meaning"? Now that I'm older, I read more about the origins of holidays and their traditions, and Easter means different things to different people. To tell kids they can't draw eggs and bunnies for Easter could be just as offensive to them as their choice of drawing would have been to my 5th grade instructor.

Would I call my teacher's actions a War on Easter? On its own, no. But it was part of a pattern that now is. And this war is offensive to me.