Five things about Easter

I wrote before about how I was raised in a Christian household, and didn't know my mom's family was Jewish in part because we would go to to my Jewish grandparents' house for Easter and Christmas to eat a ham dinner. But beyond Jewish Ham Dinner, there are some great things to recall about Easter as I prepare to embark on my son's fifth-ish one this coming Sunday. (There wasn't really a reason to do anything for Easter the first year or two.) I don't think any of my traditionally favorite Easter things have anything to do with church.

Dying eggs

The big one, of course. Well, one of the big ones, anyway. I remember many Easters spent at either my dad's or my grandmother's kitchen table, smelling the vinegar reek of the Paas dye kit and knowing there was no way in hell I was going to eat any hard-boiled eggs, leaving that dirty, disgusting bit of business for the rest of my family. (I still cringe when I think of the strangely-tinged, chalky yolks I would spy as my family ate some of their Easter eggs.)

My favorite part of dying eggs was the white crayon that came in some kits, where you could try to freehand some lines or a design on an egg and then, when dunked in the dye, it would result in negative space.

But of course, the be-all end-all commentary on Easter egg dying kits comes from Patton Oswalt.

Easter basket

What I've learned after having a kid is that there isn't really rhyme or reason to the Easter basket, and there's absolutely no unifying mythos regarding the Easter Bunny. As such, the Bunny and the basket boil down to "just how much effort are you willing to put into this holiday, and how much of the story are you willing to make up on your own?"

My own personal experience is that there would be a basket with a bunch of candy in it (usually M&Ms and a chocolate bunny; maybe some red hots), and for a stretch of years, one large-ish gift. My clearest memory of this is opening my bedroom door one year to find an Easter basket containing candy plus Ghostbusters for the Sega Master System, which absolutely ruled (as an Easter surprise, I mean; it ruled as a game too and I had a lot of fun playing it even though I never came anywhere close to beating it).

What's your Easter basket experience? What Easter Bunny myth were you told growing up? I'm curious to learn the breadth of this.

Finding eggs

We'd often do an indoor hunt and sometimes an additional outdoor hunt. The last couple of years, our kid has insisted on us hiding the eggs again and again outside until the adults get tired of it. (It doesn't take long!)

One year, I was really into M.U.S.C.L.E. figures, which it turns out fit perfectly into plastic eggs, so my dad or grandmother bought a bag of like 50 at Toys R Us and hid them into the eggs. That was great, and I did something similar for my son last year, because he was into Pokemon and I found a big bag of small Pokemon figures on Temu or AliExpress or something. He absolutely does not care about Pokemon now, so I get to throw those away!

Man, those M.U.S.C.L.E. figures were great.

Candy

I've never been a Peeps guy, so I can't speak much to that, but it also saves me the chore of having to hunt down all the Peeps varietals each year. I was a very picky eater as a kid, and that extended to my sweets. My favorite candy for years and years was just plain chocolate M&Ms, and plain candy bars like Hershey's or plain chocolates like Kisses or See's chocolate lollipops.

It's only in the past 10 or 15 years that I've really been able to enjoy the bevy of Easter candy offerings. It turns out those Cadbury eggs are super fucking good and there's no way to eat more than like two of them a day!

But massive, massive shout-out to Cadbury for STILL running the same lion/bunny commercial they've had on the air every year since the 1980s.

Iconic. Legendary.

Ham

Ham's just good, man. Clutch minor holiday meat.

Share your Easter memories with me here or on Bluesky! And consider becoming a paid subscriber! Happy Easter!