Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies

I came home one day this week to a boxful of two large chocolate bunnies in the mail. A gift from my aunt. They were big, about a pound each, one with a pink dress,  the other blue. We like chocolate in this household, but there was no way we were going to eat them all ourselves and feel OK about it.

Earlier in the week, the neighbors, who have two young children, hung an egg-shaped sign on their door that read 'Every Bunny Welcome.' Bingo! I left one on their step to add to their Easter baskets.

While it’s a bit of an afterthought these days, I grew up Catholic, and the Easter holiday was a thing, both religious and Hallmark card-esque and all wrapped up with the advent of spring. We gave up sugar for Lent, had our foreheads smudged on Ash Wednesday, took home palm fronds on Palm Sunday and doubled up on services Easter week by going to church on Good Friday as well Sunday. We dressed up for Easter and planned out our outfits well in advance. But even with all that Catholicism, we kids were most excited about the Easter Egg hunt we’d go on before getting ready for mass.

My dad was never one for church but he took his Easter Bunny duties seriously. We had a big unruly yard surrounded by undeveloped acreage so there was near unlimited potential for hiding. On Saturday, we kids hard boiled a dozen or more eggs, and lined up small bowls of food coloring on the counter in which to dip them. As we got older, egg hunts became an opportunity to bolster our allowances, and after the egg dye dried, we used felt markers to assign them each a value. There were nickel, dime, quarter and dollar eggs, and one big prize, a $5 egg. Sometime Saturday night, the Easter Bunny would abscond with the hard boiled eggs and hide them, placing the money eggs in the more challenging places.

But the hunt wasn’t all. In the morning, four straw baskets with Peeps, Reese's Peanut Butter and foil-wrapped dark chocolate eggs would have magically appeared on the dining room table. One year, we woke to see the driveway strewn with hard-shelled malted eggs which I thought was the most amazing thing ever.

After assessing the candy, we went outside to get down to business, searching the wood pile and apple tree branches, patio border rocks and planters for the tell-tale pastels. Some years, we weren’t able to find all the eggs, only to come across a faded egg many months later. Sometimes, the dog would find them first.

After the hunt, we changed into our special dresses and drove to Holy Eucharist with Mom, while Dad stayed home with his preferred gospel, the Sunday paper.

I don't remember much about Easter Mass other than it was always more crowded than regular Sundays. I never really felt much at church, although I liked people watching and the music because we got to sing along. It was the 1970s: a folk band did the music. To this day, there’s a file in brain containing snippets of the songs we sang at those long-ago masses. “Christ has risen, Hallelujah/ Christ will come again, Hallelujah, Hallelujah," I sang to Kwame the other day as we walked back from looking for the nesting hawks, which he thought was funny. 

One year, we kids caught chicken pox during the week leading up to Easter. My dress that year was a hand-me-down dress from my sister with a classic 70s print, off-white with orange frog. She even sewed the dress herself and I’d coveted it since she first chose the fabric as part of her 4-H sewing class. But due to our pockmarks and contagion, we weren’t going anywhere. I was sad no one would see me in that dress! Still, despite being sick, we rallied for an Easter Egg hunt and dressed up afterward.

Easter in Corralitos, circa,1973, a few years before the chicken-pox (my sister is standing behind me in the coveted frog-print dress she sewed).

As the years have gone by, those early Easter rituals have faded, taking a first leap away when I moved out of state in my 20s, thousands of miles from my family. My in-laws at the time were non-practicing Lutherans, and Easter wasn’t so much a religious observance but an excuse to get everyone together and share a nice meal. Someone would make a big ham or leg of lamb and we’d have leftovers to take with us on the way home.

By the time I returned to California, it wasn’t so much different in my family, although my mom would still go to church for the remainder of her days and we’d usually gather for a meal sometime after she had returned from the Easter service. Now it’s mainly my aunt reminding me of the holiday through cards and chocolate.

This year, the Saturday before Easter, Dara Ackerman and Andrew Griffin did a backyard house concert benefit for Ukrainian refugees and the Sogorea Te' Land Trust, a women-led organization that works to return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people. It’s customary to bring snacks to a house concert. As I rooted around in the kitchen for something to bring, I remembered how at Felsen club shows of yore, a person in a bunny suit would often appear in the crowd mid-show. I put the remaining chocolate rabbit in my bag before we left the house.

The morning rain clouds had cleared and the yard was full of sunshine and music lovers when we arrived. With the patio furniture moved aside for amps and microphones, Dara’s back porch made a great stage. After a fine opening set by Gabe Nelson, Dara announced there would not only be a short set break but an Easter Egg hunt.

“And there’s one chocolate bunny to find,” she said.

“I have a chocolate bunny to add, too!” I said.

She had everyone shut their eyes for 30 seconds so I could add my bunny to the hunt. As Dara counted down, I quickly plopped it in the center of what looked like a Lily of the Nile so that just the tips of its ears were showing.

I ignored that side of the yard when some of the young and, uh, young-at-heart members of the audience searched for eggs. I found a hard-boiled egg on a fence-post and a small chocolate-egg in the crook of a tree, but I was most happy to see a woman I didn’t know, exclaim aha and reach down into the Lily of the Nile and grab the hidden bunny by the ears.