A few years ago a related holiday (Palm Sunday? Maundy Thursday? I forget) fell on April Fools Day. My wife asked me how we celebrated that holiday at the church I grew up in. I nonchalantly described the ceremony of my church growing up, the Easter Chase, where the pastor acted the role of Jesus fleeing the Pharisees in Jerusalem while all the children chased him around the church shouting and waving our fists. She was, of course, astonished, and I was in turn incredulous: didn’t you celebrate this day like this when you were a kid?
I kept making the story more and more outrageous (“We locked him in the church kitchen for three nights and three days!”), until finally she figured it out. But when I posted the anecdote on Facebook, I was met with another round of astonished friends–several of whom didn’t get it even after I posted that when we chased the pastor around the church, they played the Hymn of the Church of the Benedictine Hill.