A to Z April Challenge: E is for Easter

Genealogists and family historians get a lot of satisfaction from chasing their ancestors’ stories. Finding a diary, a message on a postcard, or a photo with a name attached is like the sun coming out after a storm. One day we will be somebody’s ancestor. We need to leave our descendants a little bit of sunshine too. So here is my story told alphabetically, not chronologically: Growing Up in Cradock.

is for Easter.

If Easter had fallen in April this year instead of March, this post would be timelier. Next to Christmas, Easter was my sister’s and my favorite time of the year. Our mother was an amazing seamstress, so we always expected to have a beautiful new dress. That meant new shoes, a purse, a hat, and gloves were coming our way too.

Wendy and Mary Jollette Easter 1960

Easter 1962 or 1963 at our grandparents'  house

Easter 1965
My outfit was a brocade dress and jacket. I wore it when
Miss America Vonda Kay VanDyke was in town.
As I was asking for her autograph,
she complimented me on my beautiful dress.

Easter 1967

Of course, no Easter dress was complete without a corsage. Daddy always bought us an orchid with an appropriate colored ribbon. At one time, a corsage could be purchased only at a florist, but grocery stores began carrying simple orchid pin-ons too. As I looked around in church this past Easter, I did not see a single corsage. What a pity that this custom has seemingly gone by the wayside.

Easter 1969

The best part of Easter though was not the corsage and not even the candy. In my younger years, the options for filling the Easter basket were chocolate bunnies, marshmallow eggs, chocolate-covered marshmallow bunnies, Peeps, and jelly beans. Except for the jelly beans, BLEH on the rest. After my sister came along the candy selection vastly improved with the introduction of Reese’s peanut butter cups. While we waited for the world to catch up with our taste in candy, we satisfied our sweet tooth with a cake egg from Caffee’s Bakery. They made the best pound cake egg with a chocolate shell decorated with our name piped in sugar icing.

Easter cake eggs and baskets 1971

What my sister and I enjoyed most was the Easter eggs. We could not wait to open the Paas egg dye kit and sort the six color fizz tablets into six bowls. We lowered hard-boiled eggs gently into the colored water and swirled them around with the handy egg dipper until each egg was just the right shade. The wax crayon was only mildly effective in helping us be creative with our designs. The introduction of stickers to make funny faces was more our speed.

Easter 1965

The effort we put into great egg design was worth every minute. Despite being 8 years apart in age, we could come together on a good Easter egg hunt. We played hide’n’seek with those eggs for weeks. Indoors. Outdoors. It did not matter. They would be cracked all to heck with chips of egg shells falling off in their hiding place. We would not stop playing until Momma grabbed them up and threw them out. She was probably so relieved when plastic eggs came on the market.

I cheated - I caught Mary Jollette hiding the eggs.
Boy, was she mad at me!

To Explore more Entertaining E subjects, Exit this blog and Enter the latest Edition of the A to Z April Challenge.

© 2016, Wendy Mathias. All rights reserved.