Celebrating Easter brings us closer to those no longer here

Easter and Passover are approaching. Palm Sunday was yesterday. Passover begins Wednesday. This season always reminds me of my many Easters with my beloved Baheej.

Easter was the biggest annual holiday in Nazareth, in the Holy Land, when Baheej was growing up, and I imagine it still is. I have not been there for a long time but know lots about all the Easter celebrations that take place. We always cooked the traditional Nazareth Easter food in Massachusetts and here Sleepy Hollow.

And years ago we had many lovely traditional Easter dinners in New Hampshire with Noelle and Bud. Bud is Baheej's elder brother. Chicken, stuffed with hashweh - rice with ground lamb, pine nuts browned in butter, spices of cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg. Grape leaves stuffed and rolled with rice and ground lamb and splashed with lemon at the end of cooking. Kibbee, a layered and baked ground lamb dish.

Traditional appetizers called mezza - hummus, black olives, tabbouleh, labanee, sfeeha (a small, open-faced meat pie). Homemade baklava for dessert. It was quite a feast.

Our two eldest sons were baptized in St. Gabriel, the old Christian Greek Orthodox Church in Nazareth, where our ancestor, Father Khleif, is buried. He refurbished the old church a few hundred years ago. I personally transferred to the Orthodox church some years ago.

It was Baheej's church and it's easy for both Protestants and Catholics to convert and become Orthodox. Any time a person belongs to a church that believes in the Trinity, it's an uncomplicated transfer. If not baptized, one needs to be baptized, but no second baptism in the Orthodox Church is required.

And there is a lovely Orthodox ritual on Palm Sunday where the congregation decorates big candles with flowers and marches around the outside of the church carrying their children and the candles. It's really a children's day. Even the Orthodox churches here in the U.S. do this.

Easter Eve begins an all-night service ending with an early morning breakfast at the church. Lovely. Of course, this year all this will be suspended because of coronavirus precautions.

I believe following traditions is important. Easter dinner is one of those important traditions. This dinner also has a special Easter soup of homemade chicken broth; fresh, bite-size meatballs made of lamb and chopped onions, spices and parsley; with a little rice and pine nuts in each bowl that's served. It's the first course.

In Nazareth, the traditional stuffed chicken is cooked stovetop, but here it's usually roasted in the oven. Side dishes may include cucumber in yogurt with a little garlic; tabbouleh, a salad with parsley, scallions and cracked wheat; with romaine lettuce leaves for scooping up the tabbouleh.

This year I will make the stuffed chicken my dear Baheej loved. He so enjoyed this meal. We usually cooked Easter dinner here at home. That way he could be sure it was just like his mother cooked! (I go exactly by her recipes).

One never forgets these memories.

I have my own nice childhood memories of Easter. It was a big day for us up in northern Minnesota. We were Methodists while I was growing up. On Easter we started early in the morning with a lavish, inside-the-house Easter egg hunt. We would find chocolate Easter eggs and bunnies, and those little marshmallow ducks and other candies hidden all over the house.

Then after breakfast, we got dressed up in our new Easter dresses and clothes and went to church, filling a pew with the six of us in my family. Of course, it was sometimes snowing up there in northern Minnesota, so we had to cover our new Easter finery with coats and boots!

Then there was a great Easter dinner of ham and prime rib, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top, and baked potatoes with sour cream or butter.

My Grandmother Anderson always came for dinner, not church. She was a fallen-away Catholic but never took to another church. We made salads, green peas, mom's famous cherry jello, whipped cream "salad" and pecan pie. A lovely day and Easter, Minnesota-style.

The point is: Traditions are important and very comforting to the bereaved. So it's good to keep up the traditions, whatever the occasion, be it Easter, Passover or another special day.

It's worth doing. It even brings those who have died closer, which is good for us.

• Susan Anderson-Khleif of Sleepy Hollow has a doctorate in family sociology from Harvard, taught at Wellesley College and is a retired Motorola executive. Contact her at sakhleif@comcast.net or see her blog longtermgrief.tumblr.com. See previous columns at www.dailyherald.com/topics/Anderson-Kleif-Susan.