Easter
Easter Sunday 1962
In our front yar
Easter was an important day for the family growing up which I believe was largely due to Mom being the daughter of a Baptist minister. Mom would begin a couple of weeks before Easter telling us kids that it was coming and would involve preparation for it. Preparation mainly involved two things, buying new clothes, and dyeing eggs. They buying new clothes part I didn’t care much for. Mom would take my brother and I to the department store downtown where Mom would pick out clothes for my brother and I to try on, and after trying on several shirts, pants and sometimes a new Sunday coat, each she would ask “Do you like it?” I would after each say something like “Its OK.”, it didn’t really matter much to me, any of the clothes would have been fine. They would be Sunday clothes, only worn on Sunday. I would have preferred to have new everyday clothes that I could play and go to school in. Brenda on the other hand loved it as she always got a pretty new Easter dress.
Easter
egg dye kit
Easter eggs I did like. The week before Easter we dyed Easter eggs. Mom would get a couple dozen eggs and a dye kit which had small tablets for each color which would be put in a cup of hot water mixed with vinegar. Mom and us kids sat around the kitchen table and took wire holder which held the egg while you dipped in the cup. There were red, green, blue, yellow, purple and orange. The kit also came with a wax crayon that you could draw designs with on the egg which then would not color. I liked to take an egg and using the wire holder only dip it partially in a color then, turning it, dip the uncolored part in another color making two or sometimes three colored eggs.
On Easter morning we would get up early and on the dining room table we would find an Easter basket for each of us filled with colorfully wrapped chocolate eggs and a chocolate Easter bunny laying in colorful plastic straw. In later years there would be plastic eggs which would split in half and contain pieces of chocolate. It was like a mini-Christmas, with the anticipation building, getting up early and having gifts. After eating a couple pieces of chocolate, which Mom insisted we not eat too much of, we would have an Easter egg hunt which we would take our baskets and hunt for the eggs. If the weather was good, Dad would hide the Easter eggs outside but if it was cold or raining, he would hide them in the living room. It was great fun, we kids would rush around, locating the eggs and then put them in our basket. It was sort of a contest to see who could find the most eggs. I remember one year we were looking for the eggs in the backyard when I found one, but it was rotten. It turned out it was one we didn’t find from the previous year.
One thing that became a tradition each year was that Mom would eat the ears off our chocolate bunnies. The first year it was sort of funny, in later years it became a challenge for us to hide our chocolate bunnies so that Mom would find them and eat the ears, but she always seemed to find them.
With the Easter egg hunt over, we would get dressed in our new Easter clothes and Mom would have a photo taken before we went to church. After church we would have a special Easter dinner instead of our usual lunch.