On Sunday morning I confused my friends wishing everyone happy Easter. It was May 1, and all the Easter decorations were long gone. What my friends forgot is that I am Orthodox Christian, and I follow a different holiday calendar. I am in college, and my family is way too far for me to visit them on Easter Sunday. So this is me imagining my day if I were at home.

“Christ is Risen!” my Mom greets me on the Easter morning. “Indeed, He is Risen!” I reply and come closer to the dining table. There, an unending number of pastries lie on the table beside red-colored eggs next to the Kulich, special bread my Mom bakes every Easter.

“Christ is Risen! Look that egg turned crimson!” my Dad always laughs hard enjoying the irritated look my Mom gives him. He tells this joke every year. Finally we all get together at the table and eat Easter brunch. We talk about everyday matters and look through the TV program in a newspaper trying to decide what to watch in the evening. There are no prayers, no conversations about God and Jesus at the table.

Though my Mom was born in a Christian family and has been following Christianity all her life we never really had a serious conversation about religion. I guess we never needed to. I somehow always knew that God is watching over me. My Dad, on the contrary, was born in a Muslim family but decided that he did not believe in any God. Religion for him was a subject for jokes and cynical remarks.

In spite of my parents’ completely different views on religion—or maybe because of that—they did not pressure me into any kind of belief. Sunday school was something I first heard about when I was reading "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." So throughout my childhood I was educating myself about religion only with the numerous questions I had about the rituals my mother follows: Christmas celebration, coloring eggs for Easter, not using scissors on Sundays. She would tell me the reason as a matter-of-fact, never concerned if I want to follow the same rules. That attitude of confidence in her beliefs and the freedom of choice I always had were two things that represented religion for me in a town where nobody shared the same beliefs.

I grew up in a place where everyone had their own God. It was not people practicing polytheism, rather it was people adapting their secular and spiritual sides. There were Muslims who ate pork, Christians who practiced fortune-telling, and Jewish people who did not practice their religion at all because there were so few of them and because the only synagogue in town was shut down decades ago. All of us relied on our own unique picture of God, and that was what made conversations about religion simply irrelevant.

At the dining table, I finish my meal and my Mom finally cuts the Kulich. “Christ is Risen!” I say getting a piece of the Kulich on my plate. Mom is cutting another piece, “Indeed, He is Risen!”