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One year I phoned our daughter in Nova Scotia on Easter morning. Burton, then 11, answered. "Oh, hi, Nana," he said. I asked what they were doing. Burton said, "Eating candy and watching TV." Now, if God ever designed a paradise just for Burton and his sister, Livvy, that would be it: eating candy and watching TV.
Turns out a big Easter brunch was scheduled at the family restaurant, so both parents had to be working, our daughter working the front of house, her chef husband in the kitchen. At times in the past when the restaurant was demanding the attention of both parents, Livvy had complained bitterly, "I wish I lived with a normal family." She had a point, of course, but I think she probably preferred her Easter morning of TV and candy to a "normal" family's Easter, where the parents made the children eat their hard-boiled eggs before they could eat the chocolate bunny. And maybe even made them dress up and go to church.
When my own children were little, they would spend all day Easter hiding eggs. Having first found the eggs that the Easter Bunny had hidden, they then re-hid the eggs themselves, taking turns. Since we lived in the South at the time, the weather on Easter was actually spring-like (heck, even Christmas was spring-like in central Alabama), so they had the whole outdoors for egg-hiding and egg-hunting. And if they hid one or two too well, at least the squirrels would end up with them (as opposed to the indoor egg hunt, whose missing eggs are discovered two years later in a state of serious decomposition). I used to hope that, if the squirrels accepted these egg-y gifts they'd leave us a few pecans on our seven huge pecan trees the following fall.
Where was I? Easter games. Our daughter-in-law says when she was little her grandmother invented the game of cracking eggs. Two people sit at opposite ends of the kitchen. Each rolls an egg toward the center, trying to hit and break the opponent's egg. This game sends shattered eggshell to all corners. My question is: does the Easter Bunny come back and clean it all up?
I used to colour, with my children, dozens of eggs on Holy Saturday. Now I do no more than six. Last year I did three normal colored eggs using up two tiny leftover bottles of food coloring. The remaining three eggs I colored with onion skins—rather skimpily, I have to admit, since I forgot to start collecting onion skins two months in advance. Easter was such a surprise last year, with all the snow we'd had, and with the early Easter date. It just sneaked up on me.
This year's Easter—that is to say, today—is totally without trappings here. For the first time I can remember, I have coloured no eggs. Nor have I lined baskets with a chiffonade of green cellophane and filled them with sugar in various forms. But that part I don't miss: the under-ten crowd on a sugar high.
New beginnings. Lettuce seeds lightly sprinkled with soil and dampened daily from now on. Garlic shoots shooting their green above the ground and promising scapes before too long. Tulips bravely daring the squirrels to chop off their heads--a foolhardy dare, for the squirrels always win. And at night, the moon just off full. Happy Easter.
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