Easter - Do You Remember When Easter Was Fun as a Kid?

           As a kid in the 1950’s I always looked forward to and enjoyed Easter. After the previous Christmas, it was the next kid holiday, followed months later by the Fourth of July and Halloween.

          When I was very young it was just my sister Sue and I. After my father died in 1954, and my mom remarried a couple of years later, our family doubled in size as a “yours and mine and ours” family.

Sister Sue & Steve

Dressed in their Easter Best c1950

            At Valencia Park Elementary School in Fullerton, California in the 1950’s, we kids got out of school the week before Easter as Easter break; today it’s called Spring Break and doesn't necessarily fall on the week before Easter. After the week off playing cowboys and Indians and baseball in the street and flying kites in the spring winds, it was time to get our Easter baskets ready while mom boiled eggs.

It was the fun of a group effort to color Easter eggs, have an Easter egg hunt, and maybe even a picnic in the park. And as my family wasn't very religious, the religious aspect of Easter didn't interfere with the pure fun of the kid “holiday.”

 Coloring Easter Eggs – And Everything Else (web photo)

An Easter Picnic c1952 (web photo)

There is an especially memorable Easter picnic our family went on in the later 1950’s. While we kids were busy ruining our appetites eating Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies and other Easter candies my mom was in the kitchen cooking a picnic lunch. Finally we were on our way to the Fullerton City Park. After playing while she and my dad set the picnic blanket for eating, meat and potato salad and such picnic fare, we sat and started eating. I had thought we were going to get chicken – we always had chicken, but this meat tasted different. As the oldest kid in the family I asked  “What is this?” Nonchalantly my mother replied, “Rabbit.” “Rabbit!”  I blurted out.

It wasn't that I had never eaten rabbit before; to a kid it was more symbolic than that. Who serves rabbit for Easter dinner? We were eating the Easter bunny!  I lost what appetite I had left after eating goodies all morning.

Alas, as we kids got older the magic of Easter lost its luster. How many high school kids do you know who go on Easter egg hunts?  Going door-to-door on Halloween is one thing, but hunting Easter eggs? What high school kid would want to be seen on an Easter egg hunt? How childish!

It’s too bad that we have to grow up.

Things did change later in life, though. As you get older you don’t worry about what others would say about you going on an Easter egg hunt. On the first Easter after my wife Kathy and I were married in early 1977, her mother Ruth invited Kathy and I and her two sisters and their boyfriends to an Easter egg hunt at her home outside San Diego, followed by Easter dinner. Kathy and I decided to go and humor the old lady.

And the Easter egg hunt was fun, mostly because of what we found in addition to the Easter eggs her mother had hid around the yard. Kathy’s father Hank was an alcoholic, and as we looked through the bushes around the yard for eggs we kept finding the old man’s secret stashes of booze bottles. To avoid being seen drinking in the house he had hid bottles outside to drink while supposedly doing yard work. You know, pulling weeds out of the planters and taking a few drinks here and there. We all thought it was funny, left the bottles where we found them and agreed not to tell Ruth about our finds. I suspect, though, that Ruth knew about her husband’s secret stashes. Women always seem to know.

After Kathy and I moved from San Diego to Oklahoma City in 1979 we had our own little Easter egg hunts just for fun. It was just a matter to reliving events from our childhood, and it was fun. We would also go on our own Easter Sunday picnics – but we never had rabbit for our Easter meal.

Steve & Kathy on Easter Sunday 1988

 Steve & Kathy’s Easter Picnic 1982

          I lost my wife Kathy to cancer in 2001, and with her death I lost all of the little traditions that we had and enjoyed. But all is not lost. I’m an old man now (I turned 69 years old in March 2014) and live with my family. I have watched first the grand kids grow up and have their Easter egg hunts, and now there are six little great grand kids ranging in age from a few weeks to four years old and I am reliving my childhood through those little tykes. I can’t get around as well and I once did, but I can still take pictures and enjoy the great grand kids excitement.

Today (April 20, 2014) is Easter Sunday, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching the great grandkids on an Easter egg hunt around my family’s home. Then we had dinner. And rabbit was not on the dinner table.

Grand kids Hunting Easter Eggs 2000

 A Little Tyke Hunting Easter Eggs

Any comments? Write me at steve@dukeofcushingshire.com