Family, Food, holidays, home, Kids, Music, Uncategorized

The Easter Parade

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Daughter phoned this week to ask, or rather, to demand, that we send an Easter basket to her. She said she thought she deserved one because she had been stuck in her apartment for a month and hadn’t seen any of her friends, and, well, could we send milk chocolate and some sour things, please?  I said that we would of course send her an Easter parcel, but she wouldn’t get it until the middle of next week.

We also sent a parcel to our grandson containing old Curious George books we had here, and The Golden Egg Book, which is a sweet story  by Margaret Wise Brown about a bunny who finds a mysterious egg and who ends up with a duckling for a best friend.  Son and DIL thought our grandson would appreciate pretzel fish rather than  candy, so he got those, too, as well a teddy bear. He will be two at the end of the month.

This is the first Easter in my memory that we haven’t been doing music in church. I usually complain how exhausting all that performing is,  but I hope we never have another Easter like this one, and I would welcome that sort of stress right now.

What are some of your Easter memories?

54 thoughts on “The Easter Parade”

  1. The only Easter memory that I can dredge up from my childhood is the one that I think I’ve told about here before. My cousins were over. My folks and aunt and uncle had hidden the eggs and my father said if we kids found all the eggs within a half an hour he would give us each five dollars. Five dollars was a lot of money back then to a kid. We found all but one in the half hour; we looked and looked and looked and looked. Turns out the last of the eggs was in my father’s coffee cup, covered by coffee. Even after all these years I think this was monstrously unfair. My mother did end up giving us the five dollars however.

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  2. For many years now I’ve been part of the most over engineered egg hunt in history. One of my best friends has 12 grandchildren. Adults go out, one adult assigned to each child, and hide a specified number of eggs, each child having their own color of egg. Then the adult traipses behind their assigned child to make sure they find all the eggs. After that there is a free-for-all where there are lots and lots of random eggs but the very youngest children get a headstart, then the second age grouping of children gets the next start And finally the oldest kids get to jump in at the end. Then for the four much older kids (YA is the oldest of these four), there is one egg each, gold ones, These have $20 bills in them. You only get one and they’re very hard to find.

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  3. Renee, our daughters are cut from some of the same cloth. I asked YA about a week ago if she wanted an Easter basket and she said no. However when I told her that I was going to get a couple of things for myself when I went out to get a prescription on Thursday, she had a list of things that she wanted. And in the last couple of days, she has shown a great amount of interest in all of the stuff that I have laying out for assembling the basket today.

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  4. We used to set up Easter egg hunts in three rooms. Jellybeans were low-status candies, so we bought huge bags of them and spread them around liberally. Our daughter never found all of them, so it was normal for us to run into jellybeans at odd times throughout the year. But Peeps were special. They were more expensive, of course, and we limited our purchases of them to about a dozen. And because they were relatively precious, we hid them in plain sight so they wouldn’t suffer the fate of so many jellybeans.

    One Easter–I’m thinking it was when my daughter was two or maybe three–I trailed her as she toddled around the living room discovering eggs. I would encourage her to look for candies she might not have found on her own.

    Pretty soon she had found all the Peeps, though there were many undiscovered jellybeans. I began quietly removing Peeps from her basket, sticking them back in new hiding places. She was so absorbed in hunting she didn’t notice. While we purchased 12 Peeps, Molly found 36 of them. She didn’t tumble to my deception when she began eating the candy from her basket. Math was never her strongest skill, and my son-in-law might argue it still is not.

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  5. I’ve probably written before about the time my friend Sue had a special Easter. Sue was amazed to get a total outfit–a new dress, bonnet, shoes and fancy socks–for Easter. After reflection, Sue figured it out. “This is a costume,” she thought, “and I know what to do now.”

    Sue set off for the neighbor’s house and rang the doorbell. “Trick or treat,” she said. The neighbor broke out laughing and rewarded Sue with some Easter candy. Sue had worked through half the block before her mother discovered her. Every neighbor had happily rewarded the little trick-or-treater.

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  6. It looks like I have enough stuff to make way more than one basket. So now I’m making carrot cake bunny shaped cakes to round it out and maybe will do a Little basket for the neighbors on both sides as well.

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  7. My mother had charcoal colored carpets when I was small, and she made rabbit tracks with flour and a dried out shoe polish applicator and I followed the tracks all over the house to the goodies.

    One of our local doctors awoke on an Easter morning many years ago to find his dog had got out in the night and proudly left two dead rabbits on the door step. His young children were devastated and were convinced it was the Easter bunny and a helper.

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  8. I was rather mean to my niece and nephew when they were small…I cooked (Peter) rabbit for dinner the night before Easter…maybe made up for it by spending the day dying eggs? (My nephew hid in the bathroom and begged God to not make him eat it). I think something like this in my past I learned from my uncle who was only 12 years older than me who teased me mercilessly when I was growing up. Not nice sense of humor/teasing. I don’t know that they have ever forgiven me.

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  9. When I was a kid, my mom hid malted milk eggs – large enough to be seen as an individual egg, and not something that would melt or get sticky if my brother and I didn’t find them all. It wasn’t unusual to find them in June and July in little nooks and crannies we had missed. At my grandparent’s house, we got foil wrapped chocolate eggs. Again, my grandparents hid the individual eggs – brightly colored enough to be seen, but if we missed one, it wouldn’t make a mess if it wasn’t discovered until well after Easter. The best part, though, of hunting for eggs at my grandparents (besides that i preferred the milk chocolate eggs to the malted milk ones – sorry Mom) was that adults would station themselves around the house and if a grandchild (there were five of us, including my cousins) got close to an egg, an adult would cluck like chicken. This would invariably lead to all five children furiously searching where they were. Also, the adults sometimes got to giggling both from the clucking and from us kids being so hyperfocused on wherever we were. My grandfather was often the keenest eye and primary clucker – but my uncle was sly and would cluck quietly until he could tell someone heard him, never shifting his eyes from where he was looking, which was never at the egg he had seen near a child.

    Daughter, now closing in on 16, when asked said that yes, she needed to hunt for eggs. And that this need would continue, thankyouverymuch, so long as she lived under our roof. Possibly after that. I hide plastic eggs with chocolates and sometimes other goodies, inside of them – can’t risk a pooch finding what we hide and getting at it. Daughter was stunned to discover (when she was about 5 or 6) that her cousins each are sent in search of a whole basket filled with goodies, not individual eggs. How could that be? The Easter Bunny clearly hides brightly colored plastic eggs – not a basket that might include a stuffed animal or coloring book. Heresy! (This was, however, how my sister-in-law had grown up with the Easter Bunny and my brother decided that he could reconcile himself to that vs. a heated discussion over philosophical differences regarding a bunny and chocolate.) So tomorrow morning, I will hide the eggs that I stuffed full of goodies yesterday while she was out on a bike ride. And be happy that she still hasn’t quite given up on some parts of being a little kid.

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    1. I grew up with a two-part search. There was the search for the basket and then there was the search for the eggs. And I continued this tradition when YA was younger. At the ripe old age of 25 she says she no longer needs to hunt for eggs. Although earlier today she did come down and help me dye some eggs. This is after having said at least three times in the last two weeks that no she really didn’t want to dye eggs this year.

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  10. Will read more later, want to get out and garden while the weather holds.

    I remember helping my mom hide the eggs for Younger Sister, once I knew who the E.B. was… And I recall getting dressed up for church – a little hat AND new dress AND new shoes.

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    1. What I remember too is the new clothes and shoes and going to church. The one in particular I remember was a snowy day and I had to wear my winter coat, but maybe not the snow pants…memory oh memory>

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  11. I don’t know to what extent Easter at our house was typical of how other children in Denmark celebrated. My sister and I would each get one large chocolate egg, and that was it. No Easter bunny was involved, and to the best of my knowledge, neither was hiding eggs all over. We’d each nibble away at our hollow egg, being careful to poke a hole in the back so that if you looked at the egg from the front, it looked whole even when you had consumed part of the back. We’d keep close track of how much the other had eaten, neither one of us wanting to be the first to finish her egg. We could make them last several days.

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  12. I know we did Easter baskets and perhaps egg hunts when I was growing up but don’t remember the details. I do remember that Easter was one of the three or four times a year we would drive to downtown Minneapolis (50 miles) to shop at Dayton’s for new outfits – dresses, shoes, and hats to show off at Easter church services.

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      1. Alas, no. Our first Welsh Terrier dug up all our asparagus roots one year and gobbled them. She loved asparagus! She also ate gooseberries off the bush. We decided we were better off buying asparagus thane trying to outwit a terrier.

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    2. I think we’ve discussed the fact that we all eat candy figures from the head on down. I’ve always wondered why. If I met someone who ate a chocolate bunny starting with the tail, that’s a person I’d never totally trust.

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    1. How will the MN Easter Bunny hop through the snow to hide them? Oh, dear. One more thing to worry about, but at least it is not pandemic related anxiety.

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    1. No not really. I learned how to make Ukrainian eggs during the Easter season at community Ed but I only do the holiday eggs in the ornaments these days. It’s a lot of work to set the table up and get all the dyes done and usually I’m in the middle of my jobs high season at Easter. This year however, with Shelter in Place the eggs did actually feature in my spring and Easter season because I have already done the holiday ornaments for this year!

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        1. That’s actually a sad story. I used to have non-holiday eggs on special holders on the wall. But when Nimue was a kitten she was way too interested in what was in those holders and unfortunately was nimble enough that she could get up there. So I moved all those eggs to a basket on the buffet. And they were fine there for about a year and then Jenai called me at work to tell me that she had moved the basket to a higher spot and unfortunately Nimue got to it anyway and when it fell every egg broke. I have slowly been doing non-holiday eggs but it’s hard because After I’ve done 40 eggs in production for the holidays I’m not in the mood anymore. But maybe this fall when I don’t have to do any holiday eggs to do, I can set up the table and do a few on my own for relaxation.

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  18. I don’t remember a whole lot of Easter traditions from childhood, except having those hollow chocolate bunnies. And the basket with the cello grass. I don’t think we even had Peeps when I was small. Those came later.

    These days I go out right after Easter to buy the pastel M&M’s when they are half price. Easter is all about chocolate.

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  19. When I was little, my parents would hide an Easter basket and perhaps a couple of the larger items like a chocolate bunny and then leave trails of jelly beans for me to follow. When our girls were young, I think we hid complete baskets rather than disperse the candy but had them follow a progressive set of clues to get to the baskets.

    When we were in college, it was tradition for a group of us to sleep out overnight the night before Easter, on the roof of our apartment or on a bluff overlooking the St. Croix. Since the date of Easter varies and the weather as well, it could be glorious or challenging. Easter morning we would all go, rumpled and blue from the cold, out to breakfast somewhere.

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  20. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    Easter is just not a favorite holiday for me. It just never took hold as a pleasant experience to anticipate. I have said this before, so I won’t go into most of it. Culturally, The entire story is so confused with pagan symbols, Christian gory stories, and commercial exploitation, that I have just checked out of it all. I usually don’t go to church that day either.

    Yesterday was so gorgeous I took the dogs to the dog park where I encountered more people than I have seen in one place (except Costco when supplies of toilet paper were rumored) in a month. I heard a loon on the adjoining lake.

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  21. OT: YouTube Sunday facts. People sometimes post a YouTube video with an apology for the ad that is attached to that video. Actually, YouTube ads are attached to people. When you click on a YouTube video, computers are watching. They patiently compile files that define your interests, especially your shopping interests. YouTube computers long ago figured out I use Olympus cameras and drive a Subaru. To my embarrassment, they know I’m old, so they show me ads for incontinence products.

    Sometimes you click on a YouTube thumbnail but get the wrong video. I don’t know why. But if you hover over the thumb, it will usually run a little video sequence, then go still with a white arrow in the middle. If you click on the arrow, you always get the video you intended to view.

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  22. OT: YouTube video of the week. I planned to recommend a useful, educational channel this week. Then I blundered into Paul Barton’s channel. He is a remarkable person, a painter and pianist who lives in Thailand with his family. This video hit me hard emotionally, as this has been an emotional week for me as well as many of you.

    That video is my ultimate example of fatherhood done well.

    I suddenly recognized Paul Barton as the fellow who plays piano for elephants. Here he is playing with Peter, an elephant that enjoys boogie woogie.

    Something I’ve just learned about myself is how much I enjoy portraiture.

    Original painting is often fascinating, but I especially enjoy portraits. I’ll have more to share on that topic later. Happy Easter, friends.

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  23. Asparafus tart and cheesecake were delicious. Husband’s cello is tuned and the bird feeders are full. Laundry is put away. Time for Easter naps.

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  25. Baskets delivered, food made with stuff I found in the freezer, then made deviled eggs. Rest of the day spent watching it snow, reading and watching TV. Laziest Easter I’ve had in years.

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  26. Hi-
    I’m still around. I struggle without a schedule; I have a hard time sticking to habits without a schedule. Is that an understatement?? Hmmm.
    I remember dying eggs with my mom. We’d try new products. The crayons or the colors or sometimes just plain old food coloring. We liked doing that together.
    Baskets ended when I was pretty young. Maybe it was a money issue for mom and dad, but they didn’t go in for anything frivolous. Presents were only for birthdays and Christmas.
    Daughter still expects a basket though. We hide plastic eggs (always one in a shoe) and this morning daughter was up early to find the basket and went back to her room to read and didn’t bother with eggs until noon.
    When son went to college, I would text his room mates to put an egg in his shoe. Haven’t gotten his wife to do it. Maybe when they have kids he’ll pick it up again.
    The nice thing about my chickens is everyday are colored eggs and a hunt.
    Except today. I kept them inside today.

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    1. Our treats were like yours, Ben – some candy and maybe dying eggs, but no stuffed animals or other gifties, “Presents were only for birthdays…”. Same basket saved from last year. So we did pretty much the same with our kid.

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  28. I may have told this before: When Joel was 3, my folks came to our place for Easter and brought the first chocolate bunny Joel had ever seen – we kept most of that stuff away from him for first few years.
    He picked it up out of the basket, looked at it with big eyes, and said: “Is it wood?”

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