Zeborah

In which Easter is all about autumn

Sat, 19 Apr 2014 22:50:56 GMT

Every now and then Northern Hemisphereans will muse about how having Christmas in summer or Easter in autumn is weird and not just weird but wrong. Southern Hemisphereans have never found it to be either, mostly because we've grown up with it, but also because come on: autumn is what Easter's all about.

Do you think the disciples were wandering the garden that morning squeeing over cute bunny rabbits and spring flowers peeking out of fresh new grass? God, no! They'd just lost their friend and teacher, and they'd come to bury their hope for a better world there in the grave with him.

And then they find his tomb desecrated. His body stolen. Who the hell would do a thing like that? How ugly has the world become? The men returned helplessly back home, and Mary stayed crying so bitterly she couldn't see through her tears or recognise a friend's voice through her sobs. If a fluffy yellow chick had been peeping in its shell in front of her she'd have trod on it without even noticing, and wouldn't that just figure? It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, and everything sucked.

Just like it sucks today, with earthquakes and floods and climate change and war, and racism and misogyny and beneficiary bashing, and companies decimating their staffing while economists promise this "bubble" is going to burst, and as the world goes to hell in a handbasket the days are getting shorter and the clouds are dimming what little light remains to us and even the goddamn leaves are falling off the goddamn trees and clogging the drains all brown and slimy.

And that is the moment when Mary learns, and we remember, that Christ is risen!

Love triumphs over hate; life over death; peace over war; justice over injustice; public holidays over the erosion of workers' rights; Maccabeus over thunderstorms; and chocolate over all. Happy Easter!

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In which she does a Great Fair Trade Easter Egg Hunt

Sat, 05 Apr 2014 05:31:02 GMT

I've switched to Fair Trade chocolate, because it tastes of freedom (and especially dark chocolate, because I can snack on dairy milk until the whole block's demolished whereas with dark a couple of squares are enough, so my money and teeth last longer).

So I've been looking around for Fair Trade chocolate Easter eggs and wow that's not so easy. The options I've found are:

Cadbury's 65g Fair Trade Dairy Milk Easter Egg. Note that Cadbury make a big deal about how all their Dairy Milk chocolate is Fair Trade. It's really important to note that Dairy Milk refers to one of their products. It doesn't mean all of their milk chocolate products (like Black Forest, Caramello, etc) are Fair Trade. In fact you can tell they're not because they don't proudly sport the Fair Trade logo. Webpages like this, I can't even tell where the spin stops and the doublespeak begins. In short, if you can't see the Fair Trade logo with your own eyes, it's not Fair Trade, it's Cadbury hoping they've misled you with a sequence of carefully selected and phrased facts.

Plamil's 85g organic Easter egg. I'm a little concerned at the idea of dairy-free milk chocolate, but if you like milk chocolate and can't tolerate dairy this is probably awesome. If you don't live in Auckland the Cruelty Free Shop appears to ship.

I'm not so certain about:

Moo Free Bunny Bar, because this is described as "using a combination of natural, organic and fair trade ingredients" which has ambiguous scoping (is it combining organic-and-fair-trade ingredients, or is it combining organic ingredients and fair trade ingredients?) and doesn't sport a Fair Trade logo.

Another alternative seems to be to hop on a plane to Melbourne and buy from:

~~Haighs.~~ Um, actually - although I saw a tweet a while back boasting all their easter eggs were Fair Trade, now they're boasting that they're all sustainable UTZ-certified. Some of their links like http://www.haighschocolates.com.au/community-item/fair-trade/ now redirect to http://www.haighschocolates.com.au/community-item/sustainability/. So I think this is a case of someone at Haighs going "Oh whoops we checked a dictionary / got a stern email from Fair Trade Australia New Zealand and haha never mind."

So the other alternative is to buy some chocolate moulds and some:

Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate, the kind that has the Fair Trade logo on it

Whittaker's Creamy Milk or Dark Ghana chocolate, see also re Fair Trade logo

Green and Blacks any flavour, look how they all have the Fair Trade logo!

I've resorted to this method (using Whittaker's Dark Ghana and these silicone moulds. (I know many people hate silicone but it is fantastic at being non-stick which is really important for this purpose.) It's much more time consuming than visiting the store, and the resulting hollow eggs are kind of fragile and messy-looking, while the solid chicks are really solid. But otoh chocolate is a lot cheaper by the block than in Easter Egg form, so I guess there's some savings there.

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In which she decorates a road cone for Easter

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 06:08:43 GMT

I read Artist's road cone Easter makeover and I had a spare empty milk bottle, so I made this:

There's not as many roadcones in my neighbourhood as there used to be, but I still didn't have to go very far.

Cheryl Bernstein also writes about Easter bunnified roadcones and public art. (I also borrowed from her post the idea of affixing the bunny to a stick before putting it in the cone: the original instructions say to cut a hole big enough to fit over the cone, but the top of a roadcone is actually too big to make this practical.)

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