I love it when Easter’s in April. Yes, it’s nice to have a holiday in March, but too m
y new Easter dress with white ankle socks or tights, white patent leather shoes, my pink Easter coat (my sister Irene’s was identical, but blue), white straw hat with fake flowers and white gloves. All brand, spanking new. Oh, and new underwear, too. Almost forgot about that.
any times that means cold and snow, which is disappointing. Easter is about daffodils, bunnies and sunshine. It’s about eating too much ham and scallop potatoes and way too much chocolate.
Back when I was a kid, I prayed for a beautiful spring Easter day. Not so the Easter Bunny wouldn’t have to hop, hop, hop through the snow. No, I prayed for good weather so I could wear m
I hardly slept the night before, hoping the weather would cooperate. That’s how excited I was to wear my new clothes. Irene and me would lay out our new stuff the night before. When we woke up that morning, there’d be a trail of jelly beans from our bed to our Easter baskets in the living room. This is back in the days before Ronald Reagan made jelly beans famous, and they started coming in exotic flavors. When I was a kid, the black jelly beans (which were my favorite) tasted like licorice. All the others tasted like cheap perfume, but we ate ‘em anyway.
Early on, our Easter baskets were loaded up with lots of that shredded, pastel cellophane, and nestled on top were Hershey’s chocolate eggs wrapped in brightly colored aluminum foil, chocolate bunnies and stuffed toy rabbits. As we got older, the stuffed toys were replaced by barrettes, Jacks and Mickey Mouse Pez dispensers, then with mascara, eye shadow and our favorite perfume. Except at our grandparents house’s, where the baskets (our second and third of the day) were always full of good, old fashioned chocolate goodies. One year, my grandmother gave us each a solid milk chocolate rabbit. The thing must have been about a pound or two of chocolate. It took Irene and me a couple of weeks to finish those off. I don’t know how we did it, but somehow we managed.
Even after we were too old for Easter baskets, at our place at the family dinner table Easter morning would be a big, honking Russell Stover Vanilla or Coconut Cream Egg. All of us, Mom, Dad, Irene and me would start chipping away at our egg before breakfast, one little slice at a time. We’d each try to save some of our egg until Monday, but by dinner, we’d be done. Sure, it made us nauseous, but it was the good kind of nauseous from eating too many sweets.
Marshmallow Peeps are strangely missing from my memory. I guess we figured, why waste our time on fluorescent colored sugar when we can have chocolate?
That’s it for now. Catch you on the flipside!
Hear Ida Tell It: Easter Memories