Easter

   I've cooked up over 30 Easters.  In general, the recipe includes gallons of food coloring, dozens of hard-boiled eggs, scores of plastic eggs, many pounds of chocolate and millions of jelly beans.  Let's not forget all the Easter baskets and miles of that cellophane grass that lurks around for months afterwards like needles found from old Christmas trees in July.
   Several Easters were quite memorable, like the 90 degree April egg hunt one day before Easter and three days before little Alex was born in 1987.  Jamie was at the egg hunt, hunting for REAL eggs, no less, which is now, of course, a huge sanitary no-no.  He found the golden egg and won the grand prize which was a cute mechanical chicken toy.  The man presenting the prize to him dropped the box on the hard street and the chicken never walked or peeped again.  The look on poor Jamie's face was one of sheer shock as it was a miracle he had won the prize at all due to the fact that we were overly polite and passive egg hunters compared to the other piranha-like competitive parents who hunted for the eggs with their kids like a sport - passionately pouncing on each egg from yards away, grabbing them as their kid's trophy.
   The piranha parents would knock little kids off their tiny sneakers just to claim another egg and would leave their tot rivals crying in the mud on their little tiny bums.  The bums!
   But, alas, the most memorable occasion (unfortunately) was the infamous Minneapolis Easter bunny incident.  I will save this story for the next installment. It is a short story. It is a sad story. It will be worth the wait.