What Easter means to me

Easter is not one of my big holidays. I’ve never gone to the Hollywood Bowl for the Sunrise Service. The closest I’ve come was the Universal Amphitheater for a production of JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR.

In grade school we used to paint hardboiled eggs. But who could we give them to? What kid ate hardboiled eggs? We might as well have painted prunes.

And I never got the point of an Easter Egg hunt. When I was a disc jockey at WDRQ in Detroit we had an Easter Egg hunt at a big local park and there were five stabbings.

What Easter meant to me was candy – the good and the bad.

The good was Yellow Peeps. These were chick shaped marshmallows covered in some yellow sticky crusty sugar coating. I have no idea what I was eating. But I loved them. It’s been years since I sampled a Peep. I wonder what I would think today. My guess – I’d gag at how sweet the first bite was… then finish the whole thing.

The bad candy was the chocolate bunnies. Sometimes solid but most of the time these too were marshmallows coated in chocolate. Except it wasn’t chocolate. It was wax. Even at six years-old I thought they were disgusting.

My guess is there are enough preservatives in Easter candy to last until the next century. After all, starting tomorrow all stores carrying Easter candy will sweep it out and get ready for Halloween. What happens to all those leftover Peeps and bunnies? Are they just going to be thrown out? What do you think?

I suspect they go back to the warehouse and wait until next year. Or the year after.  Or the year after that.

It’s possible an Ed Snowden will reveal the company making those chocolate bunnies went out of business in 1956 and this is just the unsold inventory. In another 34 years we’ll see the last of the brown wax bunnies.

But for those of you who do celebrate Easter, have a wonderful day.   Stay out of Detroit parks, set your alarm for 4:00 AM, use the chocolate bunny as a hood ornament, and save me a Peep. 

from By Ken Levine