March 23, 2005
Bunnies and Eggs

Happy Easter.  But explain how Easter became synonymous with bunnies and eggs?  While those of us who grew up in rural America had no trouble accepting the concept of a man in a red suit delivering toys to children the world over in one twelve hour period from a delivery vehicle powered by reindeer and found nothing to disbelieve when it came to a tooth fairy creeping into your room in the middle of the night and exchanging the homeless baby tooth beneath your pillow for folding money, a parent exclaiming, “Tomorrow morning’s Easter and after the sunrise service we’ll come home and hunt for the eggs and candy left by the Easter Bunny” never made a lick of sense to me. 

In farm country after age five, anyone with the IQ God gave a grape was well aware rabbits, no matter how magic, don’t hide multi colored eggs around the yard.  Rabbits spend every spare moment begetting more rabbits.  No bunny has ever been spotted near a hen house unless chased there by the family dog let alone be seen collecting eggs.  

Maybe my lifelong uneasiness with Easter egg hunts has more to do with the object of the search, eggs, than with the concept of Peter Cottontail as an early morning deliveryman.  To my taste, eggs are palatable only when scrambled.  Should a well-meaning hostess serve deviled eggs I will, in the spirit of being a courteous guest, wince down one, two at the most.  But eggs served any other way are more than this kid can handle.  One of life’s great disappointments arrived while quaffing my first (legal) beer when the stranger perched on the adjoining barstool insisted on cracking and then gobbling a hard-boiled egg. Puhleeze.  When it comes to bar food a hard-boiled egg ranks somewhere below deep fried dill pickles and pigs knuckles on the top ten tasty list.  Eggs Benedict?  Much too foo-foo.  But the worst of egg sins, one so egregious there must be a special place in hell reserved for you who insist eggs be served sunny side up and then poke the yoke with a fork and right there in front of me, God and everybody, insist on dabbing a slice of toast in the runny yellow glob now covering the plate.  Have you no sense of shame? 

The marketing genius insisting on combining bunnies and eggs caused Easter to trail Christmas, Halloween and the last day of school on the “most favored holiday” list of my youth.   Easter would have been much more popular with yours truly had the bunny limited his hidden treasure trove to dollar bills and candy.

But rules got in the way even when candy was included in Peter Cottontail’s midnight delivery.   Come morning, “Let’s go see what the Easter bunny left” and beside a new short sleeved cotton spring shirt from Montgomery-Ward, (a big whoop there), one found, encased in cellophane, a solid chocolate candy rabbit.  But the instant the wrapper encasing Mr. Rabbit was popped, a parental voice was sure to intone, “Now you’re not eating the whole rabbit, you’ll make yourself sick.”  C’mon, can you name one person ever having to stay home from school or work because, “They ate too much chocolate and are now sick as a dog.”  As hard up as TV medical shows are for new and different plots, not once have they ever featured a patient suffering from “acute chocolate bunny overdose.” 

So here I am decades later and still not allowed to eat the entire chocolate rabbit.  “Unless you want to diet for the next six weeks just to get the candy off your waistline.”