Luv Doc Recommends: 13th Annual Austin Reggae Festival

Easter: The Sybil of holidays. Do you celebrate the pastel color-schemed ode to the ovum, the fuzzy chicked, furry bunnied festival of rebirth? Or, do you observe the more macabre offering of the resurrection of Christ, which happily though it may end, is a gauntlet so bloody and violent that it just barely makes eternal life look like a decent payoff. Props to the Romans for bringing a savagely deranged creativity to capital punishment that has yet to be equaled on so large a scale. Given the choice, it’s no wonder most people paint eggs. Imagine rolling down the Easter aisle at HEB filling up your Easter basket with crowns of thorns, scourges, and crucifixion nails – sounds like the kind of holiday you might conveniently forget one year and then never … uh … resurrect. Fortunately, the early Christians were smart enough not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. They hitched their Debbie Downer of a resurrection holiday to an ancient pagan festival called Eastre, which celebrated the return of spring. Thus, a perfectly understandable springtime celebration became the confusing, mixed up mutant of a holiday that it is today. So how should you celebrate Easter? Well, if you’re too old to get excited about collecting pastel-painted eggs, you might want to change your color scheme to something a little more irie, say red, green, and yellow for instance. Those colors should be in relative abundance down at Auditorium Shores this weekend for the 13th Annual Austin Reggae Festival. Formerly known as the “Bob Marley Festival,” the Austin Reggae Festival features reggae music from both local and national acts as well food, ethic crafts, drum circles, and the occasional unsanctioned waft of ganja smoke, without which a reggae festival can’t be officially festive.