March 25, 2016
Dear Everyone:
Easter comes this
Sunday. As
Holidays go, Easter
was always my third favorite.
This may be true of many children.
First, of course, was
Christmas. Second,
naturally, was
Halloween. Easter came
in a distant third. Why?
Christmas meant presents and candy.
Lots of presents and lots of candy.
Halloween meant candy. Even
more candy at one time than Christmas, truth be told.
But very few, if any, presents.
Easter meant less candy than Halloween or Christmas, and no real
presents. Just a pitiful
basket that didn’t last very long and had little intrinsic value other
than to hold Easter
Eggs as you collected them.
And maybe a new hat.
Each year, after attending Easter Sunday Mass, we would come home to
find a table filled with brightly-colored little baskets, one for each
of us. (Remember:
There were seven of us kids.
That meant seven baskets.)
You were assigned a basket and a color.
Then came the frantic and frenetic search to see who could be the one to
find all of their eggs first.
If you were assigned the color green, that meant that you could
only collect green eggs. You
might see many other eggs, but only the green ones counted.
Think about this for a moment from the point of view of the parents.
Seven kids meant seven colors.
At six eggs per kid, that’s a lot of eggs.
And the youngest kids needed eggs that were easy to find, while
older kids were more challenging.
And since little kids still believed in the
Easter Bunny, all this egg preparation had to take place after said
little kids were safely asleep in their little beds.
At least 3-½ dozen eggs to hard cook, cool, color and store where
nosy little kids wouldn’t find them before being hauled off to church in
the morning. Yikes!
There was even one famous year when the eggs hadn’t been cooked long
enough. We discovered this
the first time someone dropped an egg and it went splat!
Mother recalled all the eggs and cooked them again.
And most of the colors were cooked off in the process.
Not that it mattered.
Once you got all your eggs, there wasn’t much to do with them except eat
them and candy tasted a lot better to a kid.
As we grew older, the Easter Bunny faded out of the proceedings and we
even got the opportunity to color the eggs ourselves.
Coloring them was actually more fun than trying to find them.
In time, the parents gave up on hiding the eggs altogether.
One memorable year, “Richard” and “Marshall” volunteered to
perform the Easter Bunny task of hiding the eggs for them.
I remember because one of my eggs was standing in clear sight… on top of
the tetherball
pole. There was no way I
could get to it, other than by tipping the pole over and, of course, the
egg fell to the ground before I could catch it.
For the life of me, I couldn’t imagine how they had got it up there.
Then, many years later, I found out that it had been a team
effort. They gave the egg to
“Jeannie”. Between the two
of them, they managed to lift her high enough to place the egg on top of
the pole.
I think that was the last year that the Easter Bunny hid any eggs around
our place. And, personally,
I still like Christmas and Halloween better.
Love, as always,
Pete
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