A confession:
I have been a Catholic for thirteen years this Easter, and I still don’t know what to do with the palm branches I carry home dutifully every Palm Sunday.
They’re blessed, right? So I can’t just toss ’em, unless I burn them or something. Yet I can’t see myself standing over the sink and setting light to them.
I never learned how to weave one of those nifty little crosses out of them. And it’s too late this year to learn, because they’re all dried up and stiff and I am pretty sure that the cross-weaving thing only works when they are green and pliable.
I have seen them artfully arranged by sticking ’em through the back of a crucifix. But we moved house a couple of months ago and I haven’t gotten around to hanging any up. (Subsidiary confession: I have gotten around to making curtains and buying several pieces of furniture.)
But I seem to have inadvertantly come up with a good, or at least a final, solution this year:
Leave them lying around where a two-year-old with a pair of scissors can find them.
Now that it can no longer be recognized as a blessed palm branch, I think I’m allowed to compost it.
At least I hope so, because the shreds of plant fiber that are left will look rather unconventional stuffed into the back of a crucifix.
Maybe I can save it for the creche this Christmas.
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