Colorful Easter Bonnets

Easter on 5th Avenue

This year, we celebrated Easter on Fifth Avenue... what else is an alien in New York to do on Easter?

We started with Easter mass in Saint Patrick's Cathedral, an enormous Catholic church in the middle of 5th Avenue. I can't say I have ever experienced this before: people queuing in line and impatiently pushing to get into church as if they were going to an overrated U2 rock concert. Luckily, we came half an hour early, so we were able to get in... no seating though - only die-hard Catholics were able to conquer a seat.

The mass seemingly began as an ordinary Belgian catholic mass... but there were some little differences:

- Everything was in English (duh!).
- The priest had a sense of humor - since his mass began late he gave us the quote unquote "reader's digest version" of the first and second reading.
- At the profession of faith (I believe in one God, etc.), a simple "yes" wasn't allowed. We had to practice our response "Amen!", and the priest wasn't easily satisfied with our attempts: "You can do better then that!".
- Communion took more than 20 minutes - that's what you get when hundreds attend mass.
- Instead of a little basket going around the church for gifts, huge bins were passed around which were collected by a security officer.

After church, we mingled with New Yorkers and tourists in the Easter Parade. Indeed, New York has a parade for basically everything and Easter is no different. But this parade is not the usual procession of wagons and actors, this parade is made of New Yorkers dressed up with their finest Easter bonnets, either silly, beautiful, detailed, colorful, funny, over-the-top, or a combination of the above. Apparently, the Easter Parade started back in the 1880s when people dressed up for Easter mass and afterwards "paraded" their fashion down 5th Avenue while less rich New Yorkers came to watch the parade as a fashion show substitute. Nowadays, the Easter Parade is referred to as the "spring version of Halloween": New Yorkers dress up in crazy outfits trying to get as much attention as possible, while professional and amateur photographers (me, amongst others) take pictures as true paparazzi.

I made too many fun pictures to post them all on this blog so I made a little movie instead, accompanied by Irving Berlin's song "In your Easter bonnet" from the Broadway revue and movie "Easter Parade". Enjoy!