Easter and ritual. What the repeated occasion actually teaches.

Easter in Vienna is a serious occasion. Not exclusively religious in my household — we observe parts of the tradition that we find meaningful and have added some that we invented ourselves — but serious in the sense that it happens the same way every year. The same meal. The same hiding of eggs on Sunday morning. The same walk in the afternoon. The same conversation at the table.

My children depend on this sameness. Not consciously — they would say, if asked, that they don't care about the details. But the year when we couldn't have the traditional meal, my son was visibly disappointed in a way that was out of proportion to the meal itself. The disappointment was about the departure from the expected pattern. The pattern was what mattered.

My son's specific Easter ritual memory: the same hiding places every year. I have been hiding eggs in the same three locations in our Vienna garden since he was three. He knows the locations now. He could find them in thirty seconds. He still takes twenty minutes. The ritual is not about the finding. It is about the doing of the thing that has always been done. This is the specific thing that produces the change. The change