Browsing: easter

First Prize!

It’s not long until Easter, and here in the EthicalSuperstore.com offices we’re getting excited. Whatever your beliefs, it’s a time to be thinking about Spring, new growth and new life. The sun might even start to come out soon (although we can’t promise anything)!

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I was thinking of enrolling my two youngest children on a Drama course in the Easter holidays until I checked the dates on the calendar – the course took place on Easter Saturday and Easter Sunday. There must be some mistake. I checked again. No, definitely those days. Would people really send their kids on a course on those days? Don’t they have better things to do as a family on Easter Sunday? Has it really become just like any other day?
It reminded me of last football season when I wrongly assumed there would be no game for my son’s team on Easter Sunday morning. I was made to feel a fool, but was I really the fool? Do we really believe that just buying all that is on offer will make for a proper celebration?

Easter, like all our annual festivals, has become a great marketing opportunity – Easter bonnets, bunnies, gifts and of course, chocolate eggs. Not that any of this is in itself  wrong, but it focuses our attention on what we buy and away from the actual significance of the event.

Whether as individuals we share in the Christian celebration of the Easter weekend or not, we can all participate in celebrating new life –

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Our friends at Divine Chocolate have come up with a fantastically novel way to encourage people to send an email to politicians to keep fair trade on the agenda at next week’s G20. It’s a simple game – Egg a Politician. You get to throw a chocolate egg at one of  five world leaders — Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, Manmohan Singh or Wen Jiabao — who are all attending the G20 summit, where finance ministers and central bank governors of 19 countries and the European Union will meet to discuss “key issues related to global economic stability”.

As well as the therapy of hurling the egg at your leader of choice, you then get the opportunity to send an email to that leader – direct from the page – just as soon as they’ve devoured the chocolate.

When I first read about this idea I had visions similar to the incident that saw the

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Today is Groundhog Day, the annual holiday celebrated in the United States and Canada on which, it is said, if a groundhog emerges from its burrow and fails to see its shadow because the weather is cloudy, winter will soon end. If on the other hand, it is sunny and the groundhog sees its shadow, the groundhog will supposedly retreat into its burrow, and winter will continue for six more weeks.  Judging by the evidence outside my window I’m guessing that it beat a hasty retreat!

This side of the pond mention of ‘Groundhog  Day’ most likely conjures the memory of the 1993 comedy film starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.  In the film, Murray plays Phil Connors, an egocentric TV weatherman who, during his most hated assignment covering the annual Groundhog Day event in Punxsutawney, finds himself repeating the same day over and over again.

Perhaps it’s a testament to the quality of the film, that despite February 2nd not been recognised as either a weather predictor or public holiday in the UK, the phrase “Groundhog Day” has entered common use in our vocabulary to describe an unpleasant situation that continually repeats, or at least seems to, until one finds a way to work through it.
Making my way (extremely slowly) through blizzard conditions to the office I found myself feeling very disgruntled by a billboard advertising  Easter eggs. 

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