It’s Time to Abolish Indoor Easter Egg Hunts

It was Easter Sunday, sometime in the late ‘90s.

The rain had set in.

First off, I truly believe that if Easter is rainy or cold, we should postpone it until the next pretty Sunday.

If you disagree with this, you have never hidden Easter eggs in the house.

Or, you women have never seen mud-spattered white patent leather shoes.

Kim is still traumatized by this. To this day, I could show her a pair of dirty little girls’ Easter shoes, and she would break out into hives.

But, until we get the Easter postponement initiative passed, egg hunts will still take place inside from time to time.

That’s what happened close to 25 years ago.

Kim and Grant had dyed probably 18 eggs on Saturday, or maybe Good Friday. I don’t recall.

And when the rains came down and the floods came up on Sunday afternoon, we hid them inside, over, and over, and over again.

Finally, when the child declared he’d done it enough, we took the eggs out of his basket and put them back in the carton.

All 17 of them.

This is a problem.

Having — and let’s just call it what it is — a boiled hen egg lost somewhere in the house isn’t a parent’s worst nightmare, but it’s a parent’s worst indoor Easter egg hunt nightmare.

We looked everywhere.

We moved furniture.

In an act of utter desperation, I picked up the grates and looked in the central heat ducts in the floor.

We never found it.

I loved Easter as a child. I would always get one good toy in my basket. I remember model cars in particular.

And, of course, the Easter Bunny always put copious amounts of candy in there, including the obligatory hollow chocolate bunny.

Every year, he added some furry little animal toys. I’m remembering chicks and rabbits. They were like garnish — the same way a chef sticks a corkscrewed cucumber on a plate at a fancy restaurant.

The quirky thing was, the Easter Bunny used the same little furry toys year after year, along with the same basket and the same plastic grass.

Looking back, I wonder why I didn’t protest this practice.

Think about it.

Santa doesn’t take back stocking stuffers to reuse the next Christmas.

We don’t pull the same birthday cake out of the freezer 6 or 7 years in a row.

We don’t keep back a little Halloween candy to use again next year.

The Tooth Fairy doesn’t repossess the quarter she gave Junior for that central incisor he lost last month and put it back under the pillow when his cuspid falls out.

Yes I googled baby teeth names.

I also googled whether the Tooth Fairy is a male or female and saw a study where a dental professional did a survey to find out peoples’ opinions. Seventy-four percent of respondents said female, 8 percent of respondents said male, and 14 couldn’t even hazard a guess.

Imagine if you went to a new dentist, and right before he blazed up the drill he started bragging about his tooth fairy research.

I say all those things in jest. Like I said, I loved Easter; and for some reason I loved seeing those same little furry animals every year.

I’ll let you know if we ever find the egg.