Ask any good Brit what ‘Easter’ means and he/she’ll say: ‘a four-day weekend’. Its biblical, innit? You get Good Friday off work, and Easter Monday, plus the Saturday and Sunday in between. We all love Easter. And we eat chocolate. Loads of chocolate. Which has no calories for the entire 4 days. A modern day miracle. Pig out. You know you want to.

And it is symbolic. Of course. Everything in religion is symbolic. So on the Thursday, Jesus had ‘The Last Supper’, then he was killed on the Friday, because the crucifiers wanted the weekend off to watch Roma vs Lazio on Sky. And he rose again on the Sunday. As ya do. If you’re the son of God. All ok so far? Jesus, born to a virgin mother, died and then was resurrected. Nothing unusual there then.

Jews celebrate passover. When the jews were led out of Egypt from their slavery, bondage and a whole host of 50 shades kind of things, through the Red Sea, which God parted for them, having first sent 10 plagues to the Egyptians to soften them up.

Its no coincidence that Easter and Passover coincide. Both are based on the Hebrew calendar and Jesus was Jewish. So The Last Supper was in fact the Passover supper, or Seder, as its called. Almost as we know it and celebrate it now, but with sandals. And the whole passover thing is not to eat bread for 8 days. Because the jews, in their hurry to get out of Egypt, didn’t have time to leaven their bread. They had to get out without popping to Waitrose for some ‘fast acting synthetic yeast’, so they had their bread flat and crispy. Or ‘matzo’ as its now known.

And Jesus too was into matzo. He even said to ‘leave the yeast out’ and bizarrely, in Holy Communion, it is ‘wafer and wine’ to represent the body and blood of Christ, not bread. Because it all happened at Easter/Passover time and a good Jew like Jesus wouldn’t want proper bread.

The Pascal lambs were sacrificed every Friday before Passover and thus a whole other symbolism has arisen where Jesus IS the sacrifice. But as that leads to implications of symbolic cannibalism every time I dig into Kleftiko, we’ll leave that bit out. All gets a bit Jeffrey Dahmer.

The chocolate we eat is eggs. And I love them. Cadburys ones. You can keep your Lindt and Suchard and Hotel Chocolat, I WANT CADBURYS EGGS. And I want them now. Which is good news cos you can’t get them for 9 months a year. Thus I ‘stock up’. Because nothing tastes quite as Easter Eggs. And again, passover is a very eggy time of year as well. Not chocolate ones, but real, egg-flavoured ones. Not as wonderful so you have to eat many more to compensate. Because eggs, coupled with matzo, increase the constipation that all must suffer at passover time. As it is written.

Happy Easter/Kosher Passover/Whatever/Both

A xxxx