Easter

Easter Sunday moves each year, falling between late March and late April, and it is preceded by the forty days of Lent and then Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to Easter. For many Goan Catholic families Lent is a quieter, more reflective season, and the household effort is concentrated in the days just before Easter.

That rhythm is worth knowing if work is planned in the house. Holy Week is a busy and important time, with church services through the week, and it is not the moment for fitters in the front room. The weeks earlier in Lent, or the fortnight after Easter, are far better for anything disruptive.

In many parishes the priest visits to bless homes in the period after Easter, which is one more reason households like the house to be clean and in order at this time of year. Planning fabric work to finish before Holy Week, or to begin after these visits, keeps it out of the way.

Easter sits on the edge of the hottest part of the Goan year. May is the warmest month, with a mean maximum of around 33.6°C in the state capital, and the highest temperature on record there, 39.8°C, was set in early April. The nights also stay warm, with mean minimums above 26°C by May.

Rooms that were comfortable at Christmas can become hard work by late April, particularly on the west side of the house. Easter is a good checkpoint: if a room is already uncomfortable in the afternoon, it will be worse in May, and there is still just enough time to do something before the rains close the working window.

The quickest improvements are often the simplest ones. Closing pale-backed curtains in the early afternoon, adding a sheer to cut glare, or fitting a blind to a west window that has none can all be done in weeks rather than months, and they carry through into the following dry season too.

Anything installed in April will face the monsoon within two months, so it should be specified with the rains in mind as much as the sun. A fabric chosen purely for how it handles glare may not be the right one for four months of saturated air. Good synthetic fabrics now hang and handle much better than they once did, so this is less of a compromise than it sounds.

For rooms that will be closed or lightly used through the monsoon, polyester and good blends are the calm choice, with polyester rather than cotton linings. For rooms that are lived in and aired, natural fibres can work well. Either way, hardware near the sea should be stainless or powder-coated rather than plain steel.

It is also worth thinking about how curtains will be handled when the rains arrive. A curtain that is easy to take down, on hooks rather than sewn to a pole, makes the closed-house routine much quicker, which matters in a property where it has to be done every year.

Upholstery usually takes longer than curtains to re-cover or repair, because the furniture has to go to the workshop and back. If a sofa or chair came through peak season looking worn, Easter is about the last point at which it can be done comfortably before the monsoon. Otherwise the piece may come back mid-monsoon, wrapped against the rain and at some risk of damp on the journey.

Dust from the dry months settles deep in upholstery, and like dust in curtains it attracts moisture once the air turns humid. A thorough vacuum and, where the fabric allows, a professional clean in April leaves seating in far better shape to face the rains than going into them dusty.

For furniture in a house that will be closed, cotton dust sheets rather than plastic are the rule, and anything soft is better lifted off the floor. Doing the cleaning at Easter, while things still dry quickly, means covers go on over clean fabric rather than trapping a season's dust underneath.

For rentals and homestays, bookings usually thin after Easter as the heat builds, and the property moves from operating to maintaining. That transition is the natural time to go through every room with the list of problems logged during the season, and to decide which can be fixed now and which wait for October.

Anything affecting guest comfort in the next season — blackout, broken mechanisms, sun-damaged fabric — is better ordered now, while workshops have capacity and before the pre-monsoon rush. It can then be installed in April or May, or held and installed in October, but the decision has been made. Deciding in April also means October is spent installing rather than deciding.

If the property will close for the monsoon, Easter is also when the closing routine should be planned, even if it is carried out later. Who takes the curtains down, where they are stored, and who checks the house through the rains are all easier to settle in a calm April than a rushed June.