Yes, we celebrated Easter here, but let me tell you, the magic is about as gone as a girl can get.
Easter is set up so that if you don't have any kids in the house at least young enough to pretend they believe in the bunny, Easter is just a magnified Sunday, as far as the celebrating goes.
When your kids are tiny, Easter is as exciting as Christmas. Especially if you hide the baskets, like we've always done. Instead of a mountain of toys under the tree, they get to hunt the entire house for candy and colored eggs. There's the added element of competition, which in my family always runs very high. Jay never tells stories of him and his brothers duking it out over who found the most eggs, but on my side of the family we have dozens of such tales. Mostly involving Andy in tears. So, since the year Katie was old enough to find an egg, we've always had the egg hunt. She and Tyler used tricks and subterfuge to win. They could've taught our current presidential candidates a thing or two about winning dirty.
By the time Zack could join in, Tyler was already in school and had the edge over Zack of being able to count. Katie could count by twos but that skill didn't really help her in the egg hunt. I remember when Ty was about five. It was the first time one of my kids recognized a chink in the holiday armor.
"The Easter Bunny's a fake." he abruptly announced on the way home from church on Palm Sunday.
"What makes you say that?" I asked.
"There's just no way a bunny can get in and leave eggs hidden all over the house." he said, as convinced of his own logic as a kindergartener can be. There are few things a parent endures that are as sad as seeing your kids lose their innocence, not to trauma or shock but just to their own growing powers of observation. My heart would've broken a little bit if he hadn't continued.
"It's gotta be a guy in a bunny suit." He declared.
As far as I know, he still believes that.
This year, Josie and I dyed eggs over at Pam's house. We've been gathering at Pam's on Good Friday for the last few years to eat cheese pizza and dye eggs. For some reason, this year we decided to use natural dyes that we made ourselves.
We used beets and cranberries to make reds, blueberries to make blue, grapes for purple and spinach for yellow.
The beets and blueberries made the best dye, but when they dried they were universally ugly.
Fortunately, Patty had brought real (synthetic ) dye and we were able to get some pretty eggs, too. This was just one more instance of better living through technology.
Saturday afternoon, Jay and Zack made egg salad out of half our colored eggs. So after the Easter Vigil, while Jay grilled up some tenderloin, Josie dyed a few more eggs so we'd have more than four to hunt for. The last few years only Josie and Zack have bothered to hunt for them and Zack was going to a concert with Katie Saturday night so he didn't think he'd want to get up and hunt for eggs in the morning. He did say he'd hide the eggs when he got home and Josie and I could find them, but instead he came home after the concert and made another big bowl of egg salad. Then he hid it under the couch.
As for the baskets, lets just say they've evolved over the years, too.
For the first forty years of my life, the Easter basket was built around the greatest confection ever known to man; the Fanny Farmer 6.5oz solid milk chocolate bunny.
There are not and have never been words in any language to describe the smooth, chocolaty goodness of a Fanny Farmer bunny.
There used to be a Fanny Farmer outlet far away, down on Hiawatha ave. and it was worth the trip to drive down there and get a dollar off on a bunny for each of us.
Fanny Farmer doesn't exist any more, as far as I can tell.
Dove bunnies look similar but they are not the same.
I used to make elaborate baskets for each of the kids and myself. Jay never cared, so he just got his own bunny. I got him his own so I wouldn't have to share mine. It was part of our wedding vows; in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer but if you touch my Easter bunny you've got trouble.
One year when the kids were still little, Jay looked at me one Easter morning and said "If the Easter Bunny ever brings more of that plastic grass into my house, I'm gonna kill him, skin him and cook him up in an omelet."
I assured the kids that the Easter Bunny was much too fast for their Dad to catch. In all fairness, I admit that Jay does do most of the house work around here, and that stupid grass does have a way of turning up all summer long, so I started to look for alternatives. I finally hit on t-shirts from Michael's craft store. They have shirts in every color of the rainbow and they're not expensive. On sale you can get them for as little as $1.99.
This year I decided to try different colored bandannas. I got pink for Katie, orange for Josie and kelly green for Zack. Tyler was in Vegas, winning enough to buy his own bandanna. The bandannas looked great and weren't as bulky in the baskets as the shirts. The kids preferred the shirts. Zack even made himself a shirt out of everyone's bandanna. He looked like part of the cast of a Province Town production of Julius Caesar.
After church we went to my folk's for brunch. Almost everyone was there. It was a big, raucous crowd. The food was fabulous. What's better than breakfast? We had skillets full of eggs, sausage, bacon and potatoes, bowls full of fruit and Bearnaise sauce and Heidi and Alex brought home made sweet rolls.
We ate until we were almost ready to fall into a coma, then drove up to Bob and Maureen's where the other half of the family was gathered.
More food, more fun, more laughing.
At about five, we headed for home only stopping at a Blockbuster for a copy of I Am Legend.
Halleluia! He's Alive and I'm Forgiven!!
Bring on the vampires!
Oh, one more change this Easter; I only bought one chocolate bunny for me and Jay. Twenty seven years and I'm finally ready to share.
