Easter Memories

Easter’s not a holiday I put much stock in anymore.  I’ve never been religious and the idea of celebrating someone rising from the grave seems decidedly more vampiric than divine to me.

But we did celebrate as a family when I was young, when egg hunts, berries, and candy held much more interest than they do now (to be honest, berries are still pretty exciting).
So a list of things I personally remember or have been told about past Easters, in a roughly chronological order.

How about you? Any Easter memories that you’d like to share?

• To be clear, I don’t remember this first one at all.  But it’s been a story repeated to me many many times, and it honestly does say a lot about who I am as a person (obsessive and somewhat anal).  Apparently I had new white Easter shoes and threw a tantrum when I discovered that they were getting dirty. On the bottom.
• I remember the vinegar smell of dying eggs, using ceramic mugs to put the dye and stuff in. This must have been from a while ago- before Mom was vegan.
• There was a book I loved when I was little called The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes about a country bunny with 21 children who gets to be Easter Bunny. She’s very conscientious and determined. Recommended.
• I remember hiding plastic eggs around once we stopped using the unborn offspring of chickens.  Plastic eggs are great because it’s okay if you can’t find them. Just weird when you run across one in the attic years later.
• Dad’s cousin from Hawaii came by one Easter and I think I fell in love with her and wanted to show off so I hid Easter eggs in the yard and then found them all. I simply can’t explain my thinking.
• I remember being dishearten to hear that my parents were planning for us all to spend Easter weekend camping. I wanted everything to be the same as always (and I hated camping 😛 )
• The special episode of the Berenstain Bears in which Boss Bunny quits his job and Papa Bear tries to take over. It’s a musical episode and I found it on youtube. You’re welcome.
• Following a trail of Hershey kisses to find my Easter basket. I think this was the time we were at Memom and Pop Pop’s for Easter.  That was a great Easter basket- very sugar-centric. I remember hiding it next to my bed so I could sneak some whenever. Pretty disgusting, come to think about it.
• I remember a completely berries Easter basket many years later- I think that was the last Easter basket I got because it was the last one before I was diagnosed with anorexia- which of course led to an understanding that food gifts stress me out.  I remember setting up these weird little magnetized rock climbing wire figures Dad had to repel off the handle of the basket to steal a strawberry. I also remember weighing myself and discovering that I had eaten approximately 4 lbs of berries that day. (Weird how the darkness of adulthood steals in on the innocent pleasures of being a child.)
• And then during high school, when I was obsessed with holding onto my friends and ordering my life, I organized my own mini egg hunt in the local park for my two besties (one of whom- Gabriella- I adore now and will forever). There were plastic eggs that with candy in them that I hid in the park, and then the two of them went all over to find them. Of course, this being Chelsea, a woman who was clearly wither mentally ill or very high (or both) joined our egg hunt and found most of them.  Which was fine but also kind of strange for us.