beyondpanic's Diaryland Diary
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Happy Easter!
No one can celebrate the holidays like my Mom, and when I was growing up, Easter was no exception.
We always wore new outfits to Mass on Easter Sunday � coats in various pastel shades, hats, gloves, socks or stockings (depending on your age), dresses, and pocketbooks. My younger brother wore his new suit, tie and freshly polished shoes and always sported a short hair cut.
After Mass, Mom would cook the obligatory huge Easter breakfast of eggs, bacon, home fries, bagels or toast (with butter shaped like a lamb) and orange juice.
While Mom was cooking, we�d be sorting through our baskets. No one could make a more beautiful Easter basket than my Mom. I�ve tried to reproduce the effect to no avail. She must have spent hours decorating those baskets.
My two older sisters had twin dark brown baskets and my brother and I had twin yellow baskets. My mother would line them up on the TV according to age � but we would have been able to pick our individual basket out just by looking at them. Mom always packed something in the basket that would be just for us. I always received the white chocolate bunny or hollow egg, because that was my favorite.
Besides the assortment of Peeps, marshmallow bunnies, speckled eggs, jelly beans, hummingbird jelly beans, Hershey kisses, Mom always placed a huge coconut egg with our name written on it in the center of our basket.
Through the years I received porcelain and glass eggs, usually with a new piece of jewelry nestled into the Easter grass that she tucked inside of them.
We always received hollow sugar eggs tightly wrapped in cellophane. They had a viewer on one side and when you peeked inside, you could see they were decorated with cardboard scenery like this. 
I was always torn between wanting to shrink and live in that fantasy world or rip that sucker open and eat the candy!
I always volunteered to help put away the Easter baskets for next year, but not out of the goodness of my heart. From experience, I knew that a few stray jelly beans would have worked their way through the pink Easter grass to the bottom of the basket.
As far as I�m concerned, there�s no such thing as a stale jelly bean.
Thanks, Mom!
7:52 p.m. - April 05, 2007
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