Don’t worry, the Easter Bunny still has your address

The Easter holiday is an unusual blend of the deeply religious, highly commercial and extremely whimsical, with a strong focus on sharing with family and friends.

The holiday celebrates a remarkable Christian premise of resurrection. It’s a serious holy day that acknowledges a cycle of death and life and embraces mankind’s hope for miracles.

Being neither qualified nor willing to launch a discussion on those topics, I think I’ll let church scholars, historians and ethicists hash it out.

For many, however, Easter’s reality incorporates everything from High Mass to hijinks, with elaborate bonnets and baskets … lilies, lilacs and azaleas … chocolate bunnies and eggs … egg dyeing, egg hunts and egg rolls (not the crispy Chinese types, though).

Easter means traditional dinners with family and friends. It’s ham and lamb and cakes shaped like bunnies. It’s English hot cross buns, Russian paska, Italian dove cake, Greek tsoureki (bread baked around colored eggs), Mexican spiced capirotada and other regional specialties.

Easter also means very busy restaurants and extremely busy people who work in them.

Most of us have special memories of a specific Easter or a more generalized family Easter tradition.

I remember egg hunts at my grandparents’ New York home. If Easter weather was wintery, the hunt was held indoors. If it was in mid-April and the weather was nice, we youngsters hunted for our goodies outside. Their house was on nearly 2 acres of land, so those hunts could take a while.

Smart people, my grandparents. What better way to snag a little peace and quiet inside?

I remember the somber Easter service, the joyous music and, as soon as I was old enough, singing in the choir alongside a pastor who couldn’t carry a tune in a skip loader, let alone in an Easter basket. It is so hard to stay in key when the loud singer next to you isn’t.

I remember matching outfits for me and my Aunt Kate (who, at two-years-and-change older than I was, seemed more like a sister). Making us match was tricky, because I was wiry and scrawny and she wasn’t. But as an adult revisiting the pictures of us in our matching hats and coats with little fur muffs … we looked adorable. When I was a teen, however, those pictures were so embarrassing.

I remember Easter dinners but, surprisingly, not what was the menu.

I’m not alone in that memory gap. In preparation for this column, I asked several people if their childhoods included a traditional Easter menu. Very few did, or if there was one, they couldn’t remember what it was.

But Easter memories abound. I remember the springtime week when we moved to Cambria, and the calendar was closing in on Easter.

My young sons were prime Easter Bunny ages then, and they were distraught to think that the candy-and-egg-carrying rabbit might not know that they’d moved, or where they’d gone.

This was long before Google, cellphones, GPS and Siri.

Despite all my hugs, kisses and assurances that the Easter Bunny sees all, knows all, the boys cried a bit before they went to sleep that Holy Saturday night.

What’s a mother to do? Mother channeled her inner rabbit.

The next morning when the boys awoke, each found a lengthy, personalized letter from Sir Bunny, explaining to the boys that of course he knew that they’d moved, knew exactly where they were, and had been very concerned that they had been so worried.

The proof, of course, was in the personalized baskets and the goodies hidden around the yard of the new house (the inside was still full of unpacked boxes).

Another memory, this one from my childhood: On the wintery Saturday night before Easter, the adults had dutifully hidden colored eggs, chocolates and other candies throughout my grandparents’ house.

The next morning, we youngsters joyfully found our loot. Or at least most of it.

After a cold spring, soon it was a hot, sticky summer, and a peculiar odor lingered in my grandparents’ living room. Granny finally tracked down the problem: The remains of a large chocolate egg that had been unwisely hidden on off-white wool carpeting, behind a wall-mounted radiator.

Happy Easter, everybody! And the Easter Bunny just might want to keep track of those chocolate eggs.

This story was originally published March 23, 2016 at 11:12 AM with the headline "Don’t worry, the Easter Bunny still has your address."