Easter on Parade

FROM WHERE I SIT  EASTER ON PARADE     MARCH 29, 2014 PAT SPILSETH

The Easter Bunny will soon be hopping his way to our house with baskets of candy eggs decorated for the holiday.  It’s taken many years, but it’s finally dawned on me that it’s crazy to believe a hopping bunny on two legs will carry a basket of chocolate eggs  to my house on Easter.  It’s almost as bizarre as a flying white stork bringing babies to houses with pregnant women!  What salesperson imagined this strange idea to market Easter candy?  Why didn’t we question these ideas when we first heard them?  On Easter, christians celebrate the risen Christ, who died for our sins and rose again.   Many of us also enjoy other Easter festivities...egg hunts, spring flowers, candy, fuzzy bunnies, straw bonnets and an Easter parade.

As a kid, I thought that decorating Easter eggs would be fun.  I bet Moms think differently after they’re stuck with cleaning up the mess of cracked eggs, colored dyes, and messes on the 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 the kitchen table, but our results were not pretty.  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 begin to smell rotten.  They ended up in the garbage.  Not even the 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 they didn’t get the most eggs in their basket.  These kids are so competitive!  We gave the hunt a final try when Kate must have been about eight and Andy five.  We invited our St Louis, MO. friends, the McAdams, with their little kids Patrick and Sarah to join us for the holiday.  To get into the spirit, 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 pretty Easter dresses, their 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; Patrick, the youngest kid, checked out another tree for a different egg.   Kate dove on Andy’s back, wallopped him, and snatched the prized egg!   As their bellowing cries echoes 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, was 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 Easter outfits were ruined, torn with grass stains and blood.  That was the end of Easter hunts at our house. 

When you think about it, isn’t it strange bunnies have anything to do with chocolate eggs?  In the 18th century, the Easter Bunny idea came to the U.S. when German Lutheran immigrants in the Pennsylvania Dutch area told their children about the “Osterhase”, meaning hare, not rabbit.  Legend tells us that only good children received gifts of colored eggs in nests that they made in their caps and bonnets before Easter. Sometimes the bunny is depicted with clothes, carrying colored eggs in a basket with toys to the homes of children, much like Santa Claus.  

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.  If I ever have grandchildren, I’ll want to host an Easter egg hunt, happily dye Easter eggs with the tiny tots, even clean up the mess.  I’m hope Easter will be warm this year so we can celebrate with lilies, tulips and hyacinths not only in our churches but also outdoors.  We Minnesotans desperately need warm spring weather.  Wouldn’t it be great to enjoy Easter without wool coats and ear muffs?     846words