Happy Easter!

When I was a kid, the standard Easter routine was this: we would dye eggs with the PAAS dyes; I would draw on them with crayon and do the old half-yellow-half blue number on them. I never had any use for the stickers, plastic bands, or marbling doohickeys that they kept trying to market us. Anyway, the smell of white vinegar still makes me think of Easter.

On Easter morning, I would wake up and find the eggs (usually 6-8 of them) my mom had hidden, plus my Easter basket, which was always the hardest thing to find. Now, so far this probably sounds pretty standard, but remember that we lived on a sailboat till I was 17. You probably do not know what this is like, but even though it was a largish sailboat (45 feet), and we had ample living space by sailboat standards (three cabins plus a galley), by house standards it's, um, small. The garage in my current house has more square footage.

Nowadays my mind is sort of boggled at how she managed to hide all those eggs, some of which were always in my tiny cabin, without waking me up. And how she found new places to hide them every year. Every year I would remember where they had been before and check there first, but nope, they were never there twice. This goes double for the basket, which was not a small basket-- it was the wide and shallow model-- my memory puts it at a foot across, but that could just be the big eyes of childhood remembering it that way. I think I'm not too far off, though.

The basket always contained jelly beans (scattered among the plastic Easter grass), more of our colored boiled eggs, foil-covered chocolate eggs, Cadbury Eggs, Peeps, white chocolate coconut nests with jellybean eggs (which my mom made; again, I have no idea when she managed to do this; there were never any signs of her preparations), and my favorite, Reese's peanut butter eggs. Sometimes a chocolate bunny, too.

She never really stopped doing this for me, until I moved out. If I were there today, she'd probably do it this year, too. I am a giant spoiled kid.

I should also note that in addition to making candy, hiding eggs and baskets in tricky places without me ever being aware of all that went into this tradition, I also was never able to find the leftover candy. In fact, it didn't occur to me until adulthood that there had been leftover candy. Magic.

Lucky for me I have a tolerant husband who is willing to humor me in most things (certainly most things involving chocolate), so while I did not color eggs this year, he did surprise me by hiding a basket (well, a small platter) of chocolate for me to find. It has jellybeans, and cadbury eggs (the small ones, not the big ones with the filling), and designer truffles from the fancy chocolate shop in town, and of course, Reese's peanut butter eggs.

Am I spoiled, or what? :)