This one's for the peeps

I need to take a moment here to wish everyone out there a very happy Easter.
I realize I might well have just offended half of my reading audience. To those four of you, I apologize. But I’ve never backed away from controversy. If there are hard things to say about frog guns or turkey funerals or flaming mice, well, I’m going to say them.
So, yes, I’m taking a stand. I’m speaking out about the removal of holidays from our public lives. I’m pretty sure I’m the first one to do this. At the very least I imagine I’m the first to do it while also talking about frog guns.
On the surface it sounds a little strange to talk about the elimination of Easter. Most stores are currently filled with egg-themed decorations and marshmallow candies shaped like bunnies and birds. Families everywhere will be up to their rabbit-ears in chocolate for months to come.
But those are all commercial components of the holiday. They will be around for as long as there are people in the world willing to decorate their yards with six-foot tall inflatable eggs. What I’m talking is far more disturbing.
That’s right. More disturbing than giant inflatable lawn ornaments. Can you imagine such a thing?
The city of St. Paul made the news recently when it removed Easter decorations from its offices. The fear, as I understand it, was that the display — presumably Easter Bunnies and eggs and not Jesus on the cross — would offend non-Christians. Meanwhile, nobody seems to worry who might be offended by those “I can only please one person today ... today’s not your day” signs that seem to be in nearly every government office I’ve seen.
The whole thing is a little bit ridiculous, although it has the benefit of leading to one of my favorite political statements of all time, in which people piled marshmallow peeps at the base of the stately Vision of Peace statue at St. Paul city hall. It was a kind of peeps-ful resistance, I guess.
According to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, one protester added a sign renaming the statue, through the Easter season, “Vision of Peeps.” I haven’t been so entertained by a sign since the impromptu memorial a couple of years ago to the turkey that lived along Pilot Knob Road.
Last Saturday, the city of Rosemount held its annual egg hunt. It was not, parks and recreation officials were clear, an Easter egg hunt. It was just a chance for Rosemount kids to gather and scrounge in the grass for plastic eggs filled with toys and candy. It’s the kind of thing that I’m sure takes place year-round in some communities. The fact Rosemount’s hunt took place just a week before Easter was a coincidence, I guess.
I don’t see what the problem is with Easter. My churchgoing experience has mostly been limited to the occasional performance in my youth as a member of the St. Croix Valley Boy’s Choir, but that never stopped me from enjoying a hunt for brightly-colored eggs or kept me from eating a piece of candy. Although I always felt a little guilty eating the chocolate rabbits.
If other religions want in on the action, that’s fine with me, too. If Hallmark can find a market for Ramadan cards or Yom Kippur gift baskets, then so be it. More fun for everyone.
Our holidays are being taken away from us one by one. First, we weren’t supposed to wish anyone a Merry Christmas. Now we’re losing our only major bunny-based holiday. What’s next? Will we be forbidden from putting up handprint turkeys at Thanksgiving?
I realize Thanksgiving isn’t actually a religious holiday, but I couldn’t think of any good jokes about Ash Wednesday.
I think this is a dangerous path we are on. The more we worry about being entirely correct in all situations — about not offending anyone in any situation — the more we will foster a backlash against that kind of behavior. And when that happens people start mistaking being “politically incorrect” as being entertaining. Then terrible television shows like “The War at Home” turn political incorrectness into a marketing campaign. And if “The War at Home” wins, we all lose.