Things I Love Sundays: Easter

If there's a Bad Catholic Award, it would have to be me.

Over the years, I've grown up to be in charge during Holy Week, in charge of my life, that is. Back in the day when I used to live with my parents, every Good Friday meant being at the church for solid couple of hours, lining up to touch Christ on the cross, pray and not smile all day.

The saga of no smiling, no TV {except Ten Commandments or some old movie}, no happy songs, no meat and nothing else continues to Black Saturday.

Happiness resumes on Easter Sunday --- and well, everyone else, including the TV is back to regular programming.

Ever since I've started living on my own {that's a decade since}, I have decided upon myself that holy weeks are for not eating meat and resting a whole lot. I don't go to church anymore except Easter Sundays. Lately, I've been having epiphanies about what it means to be truly Christian. After all, when I wrote this entry, I had wanted to find out if being Catholic, Christian or simply faithful or religious was ..

Ok, I didn't really know what I could find out.

Of course I still don't know now. But after three days of being at home and refraining from listening to quick, pop songs, I realized that while we stop our lives to commemorate the death of Jesus Christ for us, I don't want to do it so morosely. He died for us so we can live -- to me, it's a disservice to conduct life, however few days, that's sad. Sure, there's fasting, and that's not criminal, but here is where I might earn the ire of some family members, Catholic friends and the church:

I want to stop being sad on Holy Week.

So I did not spend my Holy Week being sad. I stayed at home, played with my nieces and nephews, blogged a lot for the coming weeks {I'll be very busy since my parents will be home!}, prayed, read Bible passages, willed myself to come to eventually came to Walkway at BGC {which was BTW a lovely, interactive fun and simple way to understand the stations of the cross} and of course ended up watching series and movies I haven't seen, lounged in the pool with friends, chit chatted over the sorry crazy unidentifiable oh gee*insert adjective here* state of my love life and wrote some more. Jesus Christ died for me so I can celebrate my life, be of help to others {if that meant being a listening ear to someone} and make other people happy {not a universal belief, just mine}. I don't say drop everything and let's party on Holy Week. I don't know if that's too shallow but I hope that's okay that THAT is my way of being faithful. Or religious. Or anything.

Also, I'm not too sure how much I want to be worshiping statues and religious figures. If my lola ever read this, I'm sure I'd be disowned.Or maybe not :D So yeah, I'm thankful for Easter. /End of talk about religion.

In other non-religion news, I finally saw my bestfriend after so many months of failed dates! :D

Grilled cheese rolls, cappuccino and my BFF at Mary Grace <3

I wore my Angelica dress from Plains and Prints too. LOL, this picture reminds me of our college days!

Dimsum with Sophie<3 Speaking of bumping into friends, guess who I bumped into while working:

It's Fran of Frannywanny.com! It was the Excellence Awards at work and Fran's mom was an awardee {have been so, for many years already} and here we are at the Rizal Ballroom of Makati Shangri La. Photo from: Fran Ang

Blogger Giveaways! To be honest, I wasn't quite known as the blogger who does much of the giveaways. It's always hard for me to ship stuff away {sometimes I consider hiring a personal assistant to do those for me but that's going to be funny, and excessive}. Luckily, there are sponsors who are partnering with Chronicles of Vanity, such as Beauty and Butter!