Easter has always been one of my favorite holidays and I never miss a chance to break out the baskets, color eggs and watch The Ten Commandments (now that I am old enough to stay up for all of it.) However, few holiday activities in childhood are as much fun (or as memorable) as an Easter Egg Hunt. Over the years, I had my fair share of backyard expeditions in search of brightly colored dairy products, but none can compare to the great egg hunt of 1982 that had my cousin and I “scrambling” over the same 12 eggs for more than an hour.
When I think back on it, we had to be the two most naïve pre-teens on the planet not to catch on to what was happening around us. We were at our grandmother’s house that Easter enjoying a traditional dinner of ham, spinach salad, green beans and my mother’s famous cheese potatoes when someone decided it would be fun to hide the hard boiled eggs for us to find.
Sure we were a little old for such an activity, but we didn’t care. We trooped out to the yard to scour every bush and blade of grass that might have an egg hidden within. With each discovery, we placed the egg in our baskets and ran off in search of the next prize. It never occurred to us that one of the big kids, my cousin’s college-aged brother to be exact, was removing the eggs from our baskets and re-hiding them when we weren’t looking.
We hunted more eggs than I have colored in my whole life! We found eggs on the fire hydrant at the edge of the property. We located them up in the trees. They were in the mailbox, on the bumpers of cars, in the rose bushes, on the windowsills and on the hose reel. No matter how many eggs we found, there was always one or two more we had passed over. We found eggs two feet from where we found the last one, but we never questioned why we didn’t see it before. We never stopped to count the eggs or wonder how so few became so many, we just kept searching while everyone snickered good-naturedly behind our backs. (I have the slides to prove it.)
I don’t know how long it took us to catch on to the joke, but it seemed like forever. It wasn’t something that was planned ahead of time, but one of those magical moments that was never to be repeated.
To this day, that event represents the meaning of Easter for me. We went out in search of something exciting and what we found kept on giving and giving. Those in on the game reveled in our innocence and delighted in the joy of our discovery. And even though I am sure he never planned on teaching a spiritual lesson with his practical joke, the one responsible for the quest showed us that the mission doesn’t end when something is uncovered, but leads to a new life of revelation waiting to be renewed over and over again.
Happy Easter, everyone!
Author/ Writer Julie Young 