The morning began early with Phoebe asking me if you need a man and a woman to make a baby. I threw her off the scent with a very elaborate choice of words including zygote and mitosis until she got bored and asked me when the Easter Bunny is coming.
Over the ensuing days, Easter has started to loom large in the minds of both my daughters. One morning, I caught them having an intense tête-à-tête to create a strategy for finding the little chocolate eggs the Easter Bunny hides at our house. Eliza broke away to approach me with a dead-serious look on her face: “Look Mama, you’re going to have to let us look in your room for the chocolate eggs. It has some really good hiding spots.”
Note to self: Move the envelope full of tooth-fairy money.
My strongest memory of Easter as a kid was the time the Easter Bunny filled our baskets with things like crystalized violet shards and carob nuggets. A good hippie, “the bunny” probably felt really proud of herself for that year’s curated selection of not-garbage candy. I was horrified, of course.
I am that same kind of mom, now, but with the added wisdom of knowing that without real chocolate, it’s not actually Easter. Unfortunately, here in April, we have so much candy left over from Valentine’s Day, Christmas, and even Halloween that I am not sure how much more candy I can take in my house.
I saw a request from those organizing our town Easter egg hunt for candy donations, and thought, “I wonder if they’d take crushed-up candy canes and mini candy bars in spooky orange wrappers?” I abstained from donating mine, but when we then collected 400 plastic Easter eggs full of mostly candy during the cutthroat egg hunt, I noted quite a few suspiciously Halloween-esque mini candy bars in the stash. Good for them.
There has to be a word for the particular emotion parents feel when they find themselves in possession of an enormous amount of junky candy they know they’ll have to oversee for the foreseeable future. When my kids were younger I could get away with throwing it all away a week or so after each holiday, but with their little photographic memories, I can no longer pull that off.
I propose we launch a holiday where you sacrifice all your old candy from other holidays back to the gods. We don’t have enough truly pagan rituals among all these institutionalized Christian and commercial holidays, in my opinion.
On a related note: “Mama, do you unicorns like eating chicken? What if it has bones in it?”
