The M&M’S Have Changed; Must Be Easter
Happy Easter, or as we say at my house, pass the ham. And don’t skimp on those Cadbury eggs either.
After some careful analysis, I’ve concluded that there are basically two reasons why we celebrate holidays. First, because they are part of the ancient cultural traditions that connect us to our collective spiritual unconscious. And second, to eat behemoth quantities of food until we blow up or die trying.
In fact, some families define the holiday exclusively by what’s on the menu. On the fall through spring calendar there’s Thanksgiving; the turkey holiday, followed by Christmas; the I-guess-we’ll-have-turkey-again holiday, followed by Easter; the ham holiday.
In America, land of the free enterprise, every religious holiday has its own commercial counterpoint. The fusion of the two leads to some skewed images: Rudolph grazing at the manger, the Easter Bunny coming at dawn with lilies.
And food, our national pastime, is the touchstone for these events. You can tell what holiday we’re celebrating by the color of the M&M’s.
Just before the ham holiday, the grocery stores are overrun by people looking for food items originally intended to be taken into a fallout shelter. The shelf life is roughly 100 years. Scalloped potatoes, boxed. French fried onions, canned. Jars of red dye No. 6 maraschino cherries, canned pineapple and whole cloves. Best of all, a bag of coconut flakes for the fur coat of the rabbit cake recipe your mom tore out of the back of McCall’s magazine in 1964.
Their carts loaded beyond the breaking point, ham holiday shoppers line up at the checkout lane. Packed around this area are important last-minute items. Pots of pollen-laden lilies, sure to please the antihistamine-challenged on your list, and those pink and yellow cross-eyed marshmallow mystery creatures your mother warned you about. Eat too many and you’ll be in dentures by 30. You toss two boxes into your cart.
All of this stuff is hauled home to be wedged into the refrigerator between the leftover pizza and the diet pop. The ham, taking up more space than Godzilla, will later be cooked to the texture of bamboo. Plates of devilled eggs, so-called because of their ability to turn on their victims, await a dusting of the ubiquitous paprika. The eggs, of course, were delivered by the stealth rabbit.
The Easter Bunny delivers eggs in a basket as big as your mother’s old purse, which remarkably like your mom’s purse is bottomless. The big rabbit is typically dressed in a vest or jacket but no pants. It’s April. Never mind the wind chill factor, what’s he thinking? If your answer is “nothing, he’s a rabbit,” give yourself a bonus helping of Cadbury eggs for superior reasoning.
And I’m guessing the rabbit is not amused by all these Easter trees with their imposter eggs sprouting up in people’s front yards. When did we start decorating trees for Easter? Our houses are so full of festive stuff that we’ve now acquisitioned the yard to convey holiday sentiments. Any holiday will do.
My sister, capable of rising to all occasions, would decorate her yard for a tax audit.
Of course, the idea of a string of tiny plastic auditors impaled on a picket fence is not without its charm. But commercialism really has gone too far. It’s time to get back to basics. Think about what really matters. Things like the Easter egg hunt.
For many, the hunt is the highlight of the ham holiday.
The dreaded-but-inevitable hard-boiled eggs, so fun to dye, so difficult to swallow, hide in plain sight. Growing up, we hunted only the hard-boiled. My dad once hid some of them so well that they were not found until the first warm day in June. Memorably unpleasant.
The following Easter, in lieu of the hunt, we were presented with cellophane wrapped baskets. In each, a chocolate, buck-toothed bunny sat dead center, surrounded by other waxy delicacies. Confronted by such bounty, we did what any well-adjusted person would do: we bit the bunny’s head off.
It’s that collective subconscious thing again, the stuff of ham holiday memories.