The Bunny Trail

The Bunny Trail

It’s time for more chocolate.  Valentine’s Day has begun to blur in distant memory, and Christmas stocking loot has long since been picked over.  With the long span of desolation before Halloween’s bounty, enter The Easter Basket.  Jelly beans, Peeps, plastic eggs filled with various delights, and the giant chocolate rabbit towering over it all—that should last at least a week.

dressed up for Easter Sunday

dressed up for Easter Sunday

Easter Sundays when I was a kid were made for dressing up and going to church.  We didn’t go so far as the traditional bonnets, but I remember the pinchy patent-leather shoes and starchy stiff dresses that I wore while squirming in the pew, heady with the incense the white-robed priest waved through the aisles.   Easter mass always ran longer than regular Sundays.  After weeks of Lenten fish-on-Fridays, I was eager to get home for the Basket of Joy, but it always seemed God&Jesus had other plans.

We had your basic straw baskets with a long handle.  364 days a year they lived on top of the china hutch in the dining room.  When we woke up Easter morning and they were no longer in their lofty perch, we couldn’t wait to find them.   The bunny, that human-sized, Santa-like creature, would hide our baskets and we’d have to search to see what he’d left us.  One very disappointing year, the big chocolate bunny was white chocolate–which is no chocolate at all, in my opinion.  I tried to trade with my brother, but he was no fool.  That year my bunny sat unwrapped, its strange blue candy eyes staring out from the cellophane.   I would never free him.  White chocolate, indeed.

How to eat that large bunny was a puzzle.   Did you bite his ears off first, so he couldn’t hear? Maybe a foot so he could no longer hop?  His stub of a tail seemed the most innocuous place to start.  The end was inevitable, but at least you could ease him into the idea.  I had a rampant imagination as a child, and every year consuming the rabbit was agonizing.  But he was chocolate, after all, and it was as unavoidable as Easter mass.

my sister, Terri, hunting eggs in what appears to be tennis shoes and a spring-ish ladies' nightie.

my sister, Terri, hunting eggs in what appears to be tennis shoes and a spring-ish ladies’ nightie.

After lunch, we’d hunt for eggs that my father would hide in the yard.   Days before, my mother had mixed up a concoction of vinegar and food coloring, and we’d eagerly dyed the hard-boiled eggs, dunking them repeatedly in every color until they were not so much the happy pastel colors she intended as they were a murky earthy brown.  Better for my father to hide them that way; they blended in with the bushes.  Even my older sisters, usually too cool for such things, would participate.  After that, I was done with the eggs.  They’d been handled and hunted, cracked and smushed, left under shrubs to be found in the heat of a Floridian afternoon.  I would never actually eat them.  Plus, there aren’t many things nastier than hard-boiled eggs.  Except maybe white chocolate.

I’d go to bed that night having eaten more candy than was wise, and throughout the week, I’d get to take some to school in my lunchbox to prolong the sweetness.  By the following Sunday, there wasn’t much left in the basket other than mismatched plastic eggs and a tangled mess of Easter grass that had moist jelly beans stuck in it.   Eventually my father would get sick of yelling at us to pick up the Easter grass that got trailed all over the house and the baskets would retire back up to the penthouse on the china hutch for another year.

Ben can’t smile big enough–he’s so happy to see the bunny

I don’t remember ever actually visiting the Easter Bunny, but for awhile, with my own children, we made the annual pilgrimage to the mall to see the cotton-tailed giant himself.  Strangely, they were not afraid of him, despite the fact that no real rabbit they’d ever seen had vacant unblinking eyes or stood six feet tall.  Unlike with Santa, they never sat in his lap screaming in terror.  Children usually have one of three responses to large characters like this:  (1) sheer, primeval terror;  (2) desperate, maniacal love;  or (3) a strange violent urge to whale on the poor creature like the padded-suit guy in self-defense classes.  Thankfully, my children were in the second classification and we never had startling bunny encounters at the mall.

The Bunny visited our house much the same way he did when I was a child.  The kids would always have to find their hidden baskets somewhere around the house on Easter morning.  They picked through the colored straw grass to find the treasures hidden inside, and then we’d head to church to reflect on why we even had Easter baskets in the first place.  It was about love, not candy.  In the afternoon, we’d hunt eggs all through the yard–plastic eggs, no smelly hard-boiled ones at my house.

For many years we hosted a party for our friends and their children.  We would easter groupround up baby bunnies or chicks for them to hold and pet.   Once we borrowed a lamb for the event, which we had to bottle feed every few hours throughout the night.  Why?  Because baby animals!  After a group meal, we’d line up all the kids to unleash them on the yard for a massive egg hunt.  Watching the youngest toddle around carefully picking up an egg here and there was so sweet.  The older ones ran pell-mell through the yard in full-on competition mode.   Afterwards, there was always a grand exchange of favorite candy and faces smeared in chocolate.

You can debate the merits of Peeps and jelly beans all day, but the faith, family and friends that are the focus of Easter are what make it one of my favorite holidays.   As long as there’s no white chocolate. 😉