posted on April 8, 2007 06:40:49 AM
I suppose you'd have to be over 50 to feel nostalgic about this, but we got some much-needed holiday laughs this morning:
Kirby: The yolk's on me in the annual shell game
Robert Kirby
The Salt Lake Tribune
In less than a week it will be Easter, a special and holy day when Christians celebrate the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ by boiling chicken embryos down to the consistency of rocks.
As archaic religious rites go, boiling eggs for the Lord is surpassed in idiocy only by telling children that a rabbit dressed like Liberace then hides them around the backyard.
Much as I don't care for Easter, I am a traditionalist when it comes to what I don't like about it. I prefer the Easter of my youth to today's overly sensitive and plasticized Easter.
Saturday afternoon before Easter, my mom would boil 150 eggs. The dog was our egg timer. When the house reeked of sulfur so bad that Porky began dry-heaving, the eggs were done.
While they cooled, we dropped dye tablets into cups of warm water. We were closely watched here. Easter egg dye back then was not regulated by the federal government, and a particularly gullible kid could end up with Technicolor pee.
Coloring was done in shifts: first my mom and my younger siblings, followed by the old man and me. Splitting us up was found to be the only way to keep my little brother from having to attend Easter services with a blue head.
When the eggs were done, we put them in baskets and locked Porky outside. The "grass" in these baskets was the only plastic part of Easter in the 1950s. It could take up to a month to work its way through a dog's digestive tract.
Then it was off to bed to wait for the Easter Bunny. I stopped believing in him when I was 7. That's the year my bedroom door whammed open and I was dragged back out into the front room to see what coloring eggs with shoe polish does to a new sofa. I was a solid "atheasterist" after that.
In the mornings, we would race out to see what the rabbit had wrought. Egg-hunting boundaries were enforced by the old man, who held the view that no rabbit was clever enough to pry up a manhole cover and hide eggs in a sewer.
The real haul was in the baskets themselves: jelly beans, malt balls, gumdrops and a solid milk-chocolate rabbit the size of a mule. We would sit in front of the TV and gnaw on these monstrosities until we couldn't feel our feet.
Things have changed. Now it's plastic eggs and sugarless candy. This year I actually heard someone suggest putting "wholesome veggies" inside the plastic eggs. That's almost as bad as filling the eggs with scripture verses.
Someone needs to resurrect the Easter Bunny.
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"There is more to life than increasing its speed." --Mahatma Gandhi
posted on April 8, 2007 07:03:49 AM
Very funny. I'm a preacher's kid and Easter mornings were especially hectic. My Dad always held a children's service on Easter eve. Every year he had a different baby animal in the church for kids to pet. One year he surpassed himself and had a baby chick for each kid to take home. There were plenty of grim faced parents Easter morning and a few grim faced kids. My little brother stepped on his chick while he was running around looking for his Easter basket. A boy in my Sunday school class had taken his chick to bed with him and rolled over it in his sleep. A few weeks later, most of the no-longer-cute chicks were back at the hatchery that donated them.
posted on April 8, 2007 07:15:56 AM
Pixi, I think you and I could write a book about being PKs. We didn't have much Easter celebration in our home because it was all about the church, but my brother and I did dye some real eggs a few times.
At Christmas, Dad would order huge bags of that Christmas candy (ribbon stuff etc), a good variety, and each child would get a little mesh stocking filled with candy and nuts at the Christmas Eve service. What we loved is that there was always leftover candy and nuts, which we feasted on later--for days.
Our favorite church leftovers, though, were the little individual unused communion cups. The deacons would bring them back to Dad's office, and Earl and I would sneak in there after church and drink the grape juice. Such a treat!
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Dogs have owners, cats have staff.
