From Where I Sit

By Pat Spilseth, Columnist

Easter is celebrated with  tulips, lilies, hyacinths and hydrangeas beautifying our churches and homes. We honor the risen Christ with hymns accompanied by trumpets, gather family and decorate Easter eggs…Some folks have a chocolate bunny Easter egg hunt for the kids in their neighborhoods.

Have you ever wondered about the idea of Peter Rabbit or some other Easter bunny hopping to your door with a basket of eggs?  Most adults would think that’s another bizarre idea to market the holiday.  It’s a fantasy, but it works on kids.  What kid doesn’t get thrilled and excited about running around the yard hunting for Easter eggs filled with jelly beans, chocolate bunnies,  marshmallow Peeps, Easter outfits, straw bonnets and an Easter parade.

The hunt is often a disaster for that new pastel Easter dress, lacy anklets and Mary Jane shoes of white patent leather.

Buying an Easter dress, Easter bonnet, new patent leather shoes, lacy anklets and gloves used to be a tradition many little girls enjoyed.  Usually I didn’t get a new Easter outfit, but one year Aunt Sadie sewed sweet pastel blue Easter dresses for my little sister Barbie and me.  We had fresh haircuts and stood on the front steps of the jailhouse for a photo with Mom’s boxy black Brownie camera.

As a kid, I thought that decorating Easter eggs would be fun.  Moms probably think differently after they’re stuck with cleaning up the mess of cracked eggs, colored dyes, and messes of egg yolks and egg shell chips on the kitchen table and floor.   One year I persuaded Mom to dye hard boiled eggs into pink, aqua, blue and violet colors for Easter.  That happened only once at my house.   We tried dipping the eggs in bowls of various dyes at our formica kitchen table, but our results were not cute, colorful nor edible.  Since nobody in our family liked to eat hard boiled eggs, after a few days sitting on the kitchen table in the sun, the eggs began to smell rotten.  They ended up in the garbage.  Not even our dog would eat those eggs

When my own kids were little, we tried having Easter egg hunts a few years. Usually either Andy or Kate would end up crying because one got more eggs than the other sibling in their basket. We gave the hunt a final try when Kate was about eight and Andy five.  We invited our St Louis, Missouri friends to join us for the holiday.  To get into the spirit, Daddy Dave put on a gray and white Easter Bunny costume with cottontail and long ears.  We parents rose early on the frosty Easter morning to hide the eggs among the trees and bushes in our lawn before the kids awakened.   After getting the kids into their Easter outfits so they’d be ready for church, we distributed pink, purple and yellow straw baskets to all four kids and said GO!  Find the hidden eggs.  Dave got the movie camera ready to roll…

It was a race to disaster.

Dressed in pink and yellow Easter dresses, winter boots and jackets, Kate and Sarah raced to the tall maple trees and bushes in our yard, where the girls had spied a pink and yellow egg.  Andy saw it at the same time!  Dashing to the treasure, they collided and began hitting each other with their straw baskets, fighting to claim the egg for their baskets.  Eggs flew out of the baskets and scattered on the lawn still wet with dew.  Kate wildly scratched Andy’s face, and his chubby cheeks turned beet red with tears of frustration.  Sweet Sarah stared open-mouthed…she’d never seen such chaos, and Patrick, the youngest kid, took this fight as his chance to gather more eggs and fill his basket. Kate dove on Andy’s back, walloped him with her empty basket, and snatched the prized egg!   As their bellowing cries echoed through the neighborhood, their heads smacked and both started bawling.

Meanwhile, up on the deck, Dave, in his warm Bunny outfit, was filming the egg hunt as kids scattered on the yard.  Everybody but the kids were laughing.  I had to separate the fight before someone ended up with a concussion.  Already several faces were streaked with tears and bloody noses.  Their new Easter outfits were ruined, torn with grass stains and blood.  That was the end of Easter hunts at our house.

Personally, I haven’t given up on Easter egg hunts.  It’s so much fun to hide the eggs and watch little kids race to fill their baskets with eggs.  Now that I have four  grandchildren, I’m stuffing plastic Easter eggs with red, yellow and black jelly beans, chocolate bunnies and pink marshmallow Peeps, getting ready to host another hunt.

Since Charli, Max, Margaret, Scout and Ellie are just 6 and younger, I hope it won’t turn out to be the chaotic bloody mess the hunt was thirty years ago when my Andy and Kate fought for prized Easter eggs.

I hope your Easter will be filled with sunshine and blooming flowers, family gatherings and kids in cute Easter outfits without grass or blood stains.

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To contact Pat, email: pat.spilseth@gmail.com.