A glorious long Spring weekend is upon us! Go forth and scatter your daffodils and primroses. Decorate your bonnets. Hide your Easter eggs. Eat your jelly beans. Find a warm spot in the sun and have a memorable tea party. Make Alice proud.
When I was little our Easter baskets were pretty austere – we used the same willow baskets every year, and I am sure my mother was a champion at recycling Easter “grass”. It was always the same green, spun cellophane that seemed to get a little more tangled and meager each year… We had jelly beans, Peeps (of course), coconut cream eggs, sometimes a spun sugar egg with a cardboard view inside and invariably a tin of odd, foreign candies. I remember one year spending a good deal of time sucking on violet pastilles, which were about the size of Tic Tacs and smelled of violet perfume. If you were patient, eventually you wore the rock hard tooth-shattering white candy down to a nubbin, and inside was an anise seed! Patience was hardly a virtue there. Still, the tin was very attractive, and I bet if I went rummaging around in some boxes stacked here in the studio I might find it one of these days.
Like Santa, the Easter Bunny thought Easter was the perfect time for giving books. Perhaps this was so my parents could sleep a little longer? I remember best the years where Mr. Bunny left me new Nancy Drews, and once Ruth Sawyer’s Roller Skates which was a grand adventure. The best year was when I received a nice hard cover copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The illustrations had been hand tinted and were all so wonderful I fell deep down into Wonderland with our favorite wayward girl.
My own children will tell you about a few Easter egg hunts, fraught with competition and overly aggressive mommies. Honestly. It just wasn’t worth it. Our neighborhood has an annual hunt, and the mommies are always out in front, beating a path for their entitled wee ones. I was always hot gluing ribbons back on someone’s bonnet to be part of that pack, and as a result my kids never got any eggs. We preferred our own home-grown hunts after a couple of years of jelly bean smack downs in the town park.
One year we hosted our own Easter Egg Hunt, and thought it would be so much fun to entertain the multi-generational grown-ups, too. I joined the Book of the Month Club that year so I could get a free copy of Martha Stewart’s Appetizers recipe book. We made a few gallons of Bloody Marys, carefully sliced blanched asparagus, pared thin, elegant celery curls, deviled some innocent eggs, wrestled with puff pastry, and baked a few dozen ham biscuits, all according to Martha, so you know we woke up very early. And then we hid the eggs. It was about a million degrees. The chocolate eggs vaporized. The kids were whiny. The in-laws and other grandparents were worse. By 10:00 the bloodies were gone, and no one was inclined to go home! Yikes.
This year the children are in college, and have been very happy to discover videos from Amazon delivered to their own rabbit hutches; The Hobbit for one, The Life of Pi for the other. We chose these movies based on books we know they have read and loved. With finals coming up it is doubtful they have time to fall down any rabbit holes, but there is always time for a good movie. They can buy their own jelly beans and chocolate bunnies this year. At home we will be having ham biscuits and Prosecco, and then some leisure time reading the papers. And maybe an odd moment or two to reflect…
I promise you that I will not be doing any of the following! And I hope you will not either. Homemade Cadbury Creme Eggs indeed! The store bought variety are quite excellent, thank you, very much. Plus, those are the best commercials on the planet.
https://food52.com/recipes/21276-homemade-creme-eggs
Here is one of the first Cadbury Creme Egg commercials:
https://www.retrojunk.com/commercial/show/1408/cadburys-cream-eggs
Although I have to say that the sliced lemon cookies look intriguing. But not for me. Not this year…
https://www.marthastewart.com/335049/easter-cookies/@center/276968/easter?xsc=fb_3-26_eastercookies
https://www.thefreshmarket.com/recipes/details/best-ever-carrot-cake/
https://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/slideshows/2011/04/easter_brunch_slideshow#slide=1
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
-Lewis Carroll
“The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo.”
-Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
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