The only logical way to celebrate the mysteries of faith

I always liked Easter as a kid. Granted, there were some strange traditions in my household.  Three come to mind in particular:

1. There would be footprints marking the Easter Bunny's presence in the house.  My Mom would take some talcum powder and make bunny prints from our bedrooms to the living room.  Pretty cute, right?  Just wait.  The carpet was forest green and of an unholy polymer that rendered such lovingly-created footprints into mongoloid shapes.  And they were huge footprints, so we had a monstrous, mongoloid bunny. In our house.  And the footprints originated from my bedroom.  And unlike Santa, this stealthly entrant wanted us to know mot just that he had visited, but that he liked exploring - and, logically, from whence he had come. No, I had a monstrous, mongoloid bunny that clearly LIVED IN MY BEDROOM.*  Traumatic times for a four-year-old with an overactive imagination.
2. Weather permitting, the Easter Bunny provided an egg hunt in the backyard.  However, we are talking late March or, at best, early April.  Before Dad would start raking or doing lawn upkeep.  And we had two  small mutts with prodigious colons.  So the egg hunt usually involved some ill-timed stepping-in-turd mishaps.
3. My Grandmother would get us chocolate. She balanced the books for a warehouse, so getting voluminous candy was not without precedent: Many Halloweens involved getting bags of Jolly Ranchers so big they'd last through the following April. But the candy of choice was chocolate crosses.  To clarify, we'd get a 16-ounce block of chalky chocolate molded like Jesus on the cross.  Eating a chocolate bunny can be traumatic, especially when your Mother has a nasty habit of devouring the ears off of your hollow lupine treat.  But taking the head off the chocolate Jesus - which required the use of a steak knife, given the temper and thickness of the chocolate in question - is the stuff of psychoanalytsts' dreams.

That said, Easter was always pretty cool in our household because CANDY.  And lots of it.  

But we had an Easter egg hunt in our house today, and I suspect the kids will call us on it when they're older.  While I was making dinner, my wife hid plastic, goodie-filled eggs all over the living room and dining room. Then, with my parents and my sister and brother-in-law as witnesses, we let the kids loose to rip the house to shreds.  My four year old overestimated the degree of difficulty used in hiding the eggs, my daughter didn't, and my niece was confused why there were not two large dogs trying to bowl her over each time she uncovered an egg (she lives with two sweet but overactive pups).  But the issue was not the hunt, but what was in the eggs.

A third of them had gummi letters.  A third had candied apricots.  And a third had Brazil nuts. Now last year, it must be noted that they searched for popcorn and were pretty delighted.  And the gummies and nuts seemed to be a hit (the less said about the apricots and the girls the better).  I feel my wife is missing the point of the holiday: being traumatized by visits by monstrously tall, podiacally-deformed rabbits that lurk somewhere in your house, providing treats of deities embossed on torture devices  that require gruesome dissection in order to be consumed.  I mean, if they don't get their psychoses via such sugar-induced concerns, the source of their dysfunction will have to instead be fueled solely by our poor parenting.  Of which there are ample examples.**

* Note: as a pre-teen, I now realize there was a second option to the mysterious, monstrous footprints that  originated from my bedroom - I was a were-rabbit, who would change into his bizarre form on the eve of the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring.  This thought, strangely enough, was not as traumatic for me, which is wholly disconcerting for altogether different reasons. 

** Case in point - on this Easter evening,  my folks watched the kids while my wife and I went to see The Book of Mormon.