I hope your holiday was as happy as mine. Our Easter traditions are so different from the traditions of my childhood. I grew up in a crowd of egg hunters. My parents’ driveway looked like a used car lot. Everyone came for lunch. Mom and my sisters cooked. I played in the backyard. At noon, we ate deviled eggs, ham, and broccoli-rice casserole.

After Bacon and I married, we moved to San Antonio where Easter means fiesta for the Mexican-American community. Last week, my neighbor told me he expected thirty at his house for lunch. He’d just put up a new basketball goal to occupy is his son and the cousins. “Why do they all want to come to my house?” The answer was easy—food, a new hoop. It sounded like fun to me. Yesterday, the street in front of his house looked like the used car lot of my youth. I didn’t count the cars, but I could hear the party going on in the backyard.

At our house, it was just the four of us. We live far away from extended family, but we’ve eked out traditions all our own— colored eggs for breakfast and gifts for my big girls in their babyhood Easter baskets. No one, not even the dog was spared the crush of a confetti-filled egg. A cascarone cracked over my head meant I was loved. I wore the flecks of bright paper and random eggshells all day as my badge of remembrance.