Gary Brown: Egg hunts and chocolate, cherished Easter traditions

Jack Handy – the "Deep Thoughts" skit guy on "Saturday Night Live" – might have said it best years ago when talking about the proper execution of a popular Easter tradition.

"Good idea: Finding the Easter eggs on Easter. Bad idea: Finding the Easter eggs on Christmas."

Colored eggs, it turns out, have a shelf life outside of the refrigerator that is shorter than the 10 months that the remainder of a bag brilliantly hued jelly beans can hang around at the bottom of a drawer and still be digestible for those seriously in need of a snack.

Trust me, I understand what Handy was saying. Even though he was going for humor, the egg hunt thing strikes a very serious chord with me, no doubt with most of us.

Aided by our mother, my siblings and I colored eggs in preparation for every Easter. We dipped them in water dyed with food coloring. With drops of different colors spreading about the surface of the water and swirling around the outside of the eggs when we dipped them, the patterns created on our eggs seemed endless. Like snowflakes, each egg was different – colorful in its own way – and worthy of all the "ooos" and "aaahs" that we gave to the final products.

Mom, of course, threw in many wildly encouraging comments.

"Look how brightly colored that one is!"

"Oh, that one looks like it's wrapped in a rainbow!"

"My heavens, this one is almost identical to your Uncle Floyd's golf pants!"

Then we set them aside in the refrigerator, confident that when the Easter Bunny arrived with our candy baskets he'd take time to hide the colored eggs, too.

Easter Bunny eagerly awaited

The arrival of the Easter Bunny was one of the most anticipated holiday traditions in our house. Of course, at that age, we likely were going to appreciate any activity that delayed us being hauled off to church and forced to sit still or kneel for an hour.

I know that clashes with accepted biblical thinking about Easter. The secular custom of worshiping the Easter Bunny at the sight of colored eggs and candy is sort of sacrilegious. But, barely out of diapers, we didn't have a deep grasp of all things theological. We just thanked God if the chocolate eggs in our Easter baskets were solid or cream filled instead of hollow.

Talk about sacrilegious, there were few things that could happen on Easter mornings early in our lives that would cause us to lose the faith more quickly than to lift a hunk of bunny-shaped chocolate that seemed heavy enough to be sweet clear through, only to find out that it was filled with nothing but air, so the ears crumpled into little pieces when we bit them off.

But, as long as our parents somehow convinced the holiday hare not to be cheap about it, we continued to buy into the whole story about how the Bunny brought our Easter basket.

Taking time to hide eggs

I'm sorry. Easter baskets. Plural.

"The Easter Bunny delivers well over 1 billion baskets each Easter to kids all over the world," according to a posting at the website trackeasterbunny.com.

The estimate was given a few years ago, so the number of deliveries may have increased, making the job of Easter Bunny even more taxing today.

Despite that herculean effort – a Santa-like all-night accomplishment, without the help of reindeer or a sleigh – we, as kids, still believed what our parents told us. We figured that the Easter Bunny not only brought us our baskets, the baskets for all our friends in the neighborhood, indeed baskets to every child around the globe, but the hard-working little creature also took time to go to every refrigerator to get the eggs we had colored and hide them indoors beside furniture legs or behind books and outdoors at the base of trees or under shrubs.

The Easter Bunny, apparently, was big on breaking and entering and playing practical jokes.

Worse yet, he apparently was planted among us by our parents, if you believe a meme I saw on social media the other day.

"FACT: Easter egg hunts prove that your children CAN find things when they want to!"

Busted by the Easter Bunny. God help us.

Reach Gary at gary.brown.rep@gmail.com. On Twitter: @gbrownREP.

This article originally appeared on The Alliance Review: Eggs, chocolate among best of Easter traditions