Day 205 - Vernal Bear Day

Before I left Minneapolis to begin my Foreign Service career, I was introduced to a personal holiday by my friend Thom, Vernal Bear Day. Thom and his ex-wife created the holiday for themselves since they enjoyed the memory of children's holiday activities such as exchanging Valentines in February, looking for Easter baskets in March or April, and exchanging May baskets, but they had no children to share those holidays. Vernal Bear Day was the solution. On a Sunday in the spring, not necessarily on a fixed date (it was, after all, a personal holiday) they would exchange Vernal Bear Day baskets.

The rules for what to include in a Vernal Bear Day basket were simple:

Vernal Bear Day in Germany

• There must be bears.
• There must be chocolate.
• There may be flowers.
• No bunnies are allowed.
• Chickies and peeps are optional.

When Thom and his ex split up, Thom and I observed the holiday while I was still in the U.S. Once I arrived in Germany and the space shuttle blew up, I began to share the holiday with my colleagues.

The first year in Germany, a friend from Romania, Gayle, was in town the weekend I had had invited my friends to celebrate. Together, Gayle and I created a basket for everyone and we hid them around my apartment. My guests arrived for brunch and we took turns looking for the hidden baskets.

Vernal Bear Day Loot in Qatar

The next year, since I now had photos to show everyone what a Vernal Bear Day basket looked like, I invited friends, some from the year before and some new, and this time asked that they bring a basket to hide, but with the additional twist that each basket should be brought in disguise or hidden in a bag or box. That became the pattern in the future.

The first spring in Doha, I invited all the Americans at the embassy to a Vernal Bear Day brunch. All the Americans, including the ambassador and his wife. I found birthday party invitations that had a bear on the front with the words, Come to a Bear Day Party which I modified with a caret between a and Bear to add Vernal above. I gave everyone the rules and looked forward to how the baskets turned out.

One of the guests was an extra - a sailor in town to make arrangements for an upcoming ship visit. He was one of those TDYers we included in all our socializing and entertaining. He won the most creative basket award, if I had decided there would be such an award. His basket consisted of a box of alfalfa sprouts as the Easter grass substitute with a stuffed teddy bear and chocolate bars on top.

That first Vernal Bear Day in Doha was most memorable because of the ambassador's reaction to it all. He kept mentioning that he had never heard of the holiday before. I must have told him ten times that no one had heard of it before because it was a personal holiday. It never seemed to sink in.

That wasn't the last time the ambassador and I experienced a failure to communicate.