by Jean Witt, Wesley Homes Des Moines resident
Although I was born on Easter Sunday, Easter was not celebrated very extensively when I was a child. Family legend has it that Dad had a hard time keeping his mind on the sermon he was preaching that morning ? he kept seeing his wife and new baby in their hospital room instead of the church around him.
Someone told me that because I was born on Easter I would have an Easter birthday every 11 years. I did when I was eleven but never again. Something was wrong with my informant?s calculations. Nevertheless, every year I look at March in my new calendar, just in case.
We have a set of snapshots, taken when my brother Bob and I were little (he about three and I about six) of us with our parents and Grandpa Gleason in the front yard of our ranch house. I suspect they were taken on Easter, as we are all dressed up.
We always had an Easter egg hunt, possibly before we went to town to church.? Mother must have dyed the eggs after we went to bed and put them out before we got up in the morning. After the initial hunt, Bob and I took turns, during the rest of the day, hiding them from each other and finding them all over again. Our front lawn was rarely mowed, and the shaggy grass made perfect nests. Dad raised rabbits, and the neighbors raised chickens and we knew damn well that rabbits didn?t lay eggs.
By the time we were school age we did the dyeing of the eggs on the Saturday before Easter. I think our parents still put them out for us to find. I learned how to make stuffed hard-boiled eggs at a young age. Only eggs that had become badly cracked and dirty from much re-hiding were discarded. Mother also taught us how to blow eggs; they were fragile, but they lasted longer than cooked ones.
I can?t remember much about Easter during our years in Spokane. We usually were invited to dinner out at one of the near-by Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps, where Dad ? in his role as district chaplain ? conducted a very simple, non-denominational Easter service.
During my college years at WSC [Washington State College, now Washington State University (WSU)] I had a roommate named Shoupy who was very active in a campus youth group. They organized an Easter sunrise service every year, on the east-facing grassy slope behind Agony Hall, the music building. March sunrises in the Palouse country tend to be rather chilly and sometimes frosty affairs, and the Easter services were not very well attended. I went to support Shoupy and fill out the crowd, but even warmly dressed, I found it a bit of an endurance contest.
When our three girls were little, my husband Joe and I also dyed and hid Easter eggs. We had a big yard with lots of good places for hiding eggs. Our daughters soon took over the job of egg dyeing, usually with packaged dyes from the grocery store, but later we experimented with home-made dyes from onion peels, spinach, grape juice, etc. Sometimes we tied the eggs in rags with interestingly shaped leaves, to imprint a design on them.
I have pictures of the girls in their best dresses, as they hunted for Easter eggs. Kids grow so fast that I made a new set of spring dresses every year and sometimes one for myself. One year my mother-in-law beat me to it and bought them dresses all around. She usually came for dinner on Easter.
At present, we have no little kids to hunt Easter eggs, but my oldest daughter still dyes a few to use for table decorations when she has the family to dinner.
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