This Child’s Small Town Easter

I don’t come from a religious family. My mom may have gone to church on an occasional Easter or Christmas, not every one though.  My mom would drag me along. Actually it wasn’t dragging. I kind of liked it. The building. The stained glass windows. The gold (and we weren’t even Catholics!). My dad never attended. Never.

So my childhood memories of Easter are more of the Easter Bunny type, not the Christ is risen type. Not that there is anything wrong with that!

The first memory is of helping my mom make Easter candy. We would get coconuts from the grocery store, bring them home and smash them with a hammer. I got to do the smashing! Then we would scrape the coconut off the shell in big chunks which we fed to a hand grinder. My dad had the job of turning the crank on the grinder. Man’s work! Haha. Then we added sugar to the ground coconut, mixed them together and formed them into little egg shaped balls and dipped them into hot melted chocolate!  I couldn’t wait until they cooled off! I was the official taste tester. Yum.

The second memory is about greed and gluttony. Remember, I was the “came way behind” child in my family. So when I was Easter basket age, my four siblings had left the home and had families of their own.  That meant I would not just get Easter baskets from my parents, but from four other households as well. I was awash in chocolate! I didn’t care if that Easter Bunny was solid or hollow! I liked white chocolate best. Still do. I know, it’s not really chocolate, but wow is it good!  I can remember one year having eleven Easter baskets. There is some thing to be said for being the baby of the family, especially one that came twelve years behind the rest!

Lastly, and leastly, there were the Easter egg hunts. I was a shy child, an introvert at five.  My mom would take me to Easter egg hunts and when the starter said go I would cling to my mom’s side. Like the Soup Nazi might say…no eggs for you!  My mom would get frustrated with my clinginess and my shyness. That theme continued until her death in my sophomore year in high school!  But, wow, she could make a mean coconut cream egg!

I hope you all have a wonderful Easter and that you spend some time thinking about your childhood Easter traditions. For me, that was a long, long time ago. But sometimes, like this morning, it feels like only last week.