Easter without tears (or blood or crowns of thorns)

"Who likes these?" asks Clara the teaching assistant, holding up a brace of hot cross buns. Hands wave. Lips are licked. Beads of saliva form at the corners of mouths. Arms stretch forward.

"Well, you're not having them," says Clara. "They're for the children. I'm using them in music."

"You're dicing with death teasing the other teachers like that," I say to her, as we head for the hall. "They ran out of chocolate biscuits yesterday and they're getting desperate. I could swear I found some sucked pigeon feathers by the kettle this morning."

"Well, we need them to explain Easter to reception," says Clara.

"If you say so," I say. "I vote we just do the hymns and let them interpret them any way they want. You could link almost all of them to current obsessions."

"'There is a green hill?'"

"Tourism,"

"'Forty days and forty nights?'"

"Faddy diets."

"'Trotting, trotting to Jerusalem,?'"

"Animal welfare. And rubbish lyric writing."

"Sasha wants the story told," says Clara, primly. "So shall I be the one to do it this year?"

"Be my guest," I say. "I'll be in the cupboard, polishing my maraccas."

Easter euphemisms have arrived even earlier at school this year. (Personally, I blame global warming for the general tendency to turn good, crisp unambiguous language into mush, though the evidence is purely circumstantial).

It's not hard to tell the Christmas story. After all, the themes - celebrity babies, royalty, exotic travel and goodie bags - tie in so well with society's major preoccupations.

Then, just as the last angel pictures come down off the Good Work board, in springs Easter - all betrayal, suffering and death. True believers would, of course, count everlasting life and redemption for one and all as a happy ending - but however great their commitment to the idea, it tends to lose a little in the retelling to 5 year olds, especially as nobody ever seems to bother explaining how, in the intervening three months, it's bye bye Baby Jesus and hello Fisher of Men.

You've got to give Clara credit for persistence, though.

"Who likes hot cross buns?" she says, wiping off what looks like a big blob of staff drool before holding one up. The arms wave.

"What's on top of them?"

"Butter." "Jam." "Honey." "Your finger."

"No," says Clara, "It's a cross. It's all about what happens at Easter. It's a little bit sad because Jesus got put on a cross. Why?"

"Because he was going to get eaten?"

"No....anyway. His friends came to look for him and he wasn't there. And on Easter Sunday, what happened. Was Jesus still dead?"

"Yes," say the children, logically enough.

"No. He came alive again. Which was good, wasn't it?"

The children look extremely doubtful. The class hamster has recently died. Having all been read tasteful books designed to promote the idea of death as a one-way rite of passage, this must all be coming as a terrible shock, especially the notion that Hammy could even now be trying to dig frantically through the shoebox and back up through the earth.

"He's not alive now, is he?" asks one child with noticeable trepidation.

"No," says Clara, "It was a very long time ago. But if you go into a church and look carefully, you may see a little Jesus on a cross."

They seem disinclined to try this out for themselves.

One thing's for sure. Clara's Easter chats can do nothing but help the spread of secularism. And if I can somehow get her to do the same thing for every other religion, too, the world is practically bound to become a better place.