Fielder

I was paying for my sinful car­amel macchiato at my favorite coffee shop one day last week when I no­ticed an item placed on the counter for impulse buying. It was a chocolate Easter bunny on a stick.

And I realized that it’s time for my annual ode to Easter goodies.

Someone has come up with a good idea, I think. By impaling a cocoa-flavored bunny on a stick, they have tried to avert that whole sticky, smeary-fingers Easter syndrome. They should know that tiny yellow fluffy dresses and adorable toddler sports jackets are not ready for Sunday school without a chocolate smear down the front.

People have tried other means of Easter sanitation, but none of them really work. Take Easter eggs themselves. Nowadays, Eas­ter eggs by and large are plastic and come apart for hiding goodies. Plastic eggs are sanitary. They are recyclable, if a mom is of a mind to wash and store them. They can be filled with everything from M&Ms to pennies, but somehow they just don’t seem right to me.

For one thing, the color doesn’t come off on your fingers. And grass doesn’t stick to them. Kids are missing out, as well, on the chance of botulism from improperly prepared boiled eggs. How fun is that? But hardly anybody boils hen eggs anymore, and those icky colored-candy eggs are almost extinct. That doesn’t mean that you aren’t sitting around with a queasy stomach at this moment, pondering the true meaning of Easter.

All year the Easter bunny keeps his long, droopy ears to the ground, listening for secret re­cipes. He putters around the hutch thinking, what nauseating confection of sugar and putrid pink marshmallow can I come up with this year? Then on Easter Sunday morning he hides his wares where boys and girls are sure to find them, happy in the knowledge that they will wear their Easter treats to church.

It’s good they’ve found a reasonable substitute for candy eggs, which are the foulest connections on this earth. Parents always hated them but felt it was their duty to buy poison purple and slime green spheroids and hide them in the flowerbed. They’re hard on the outside, sticky on the inside, and no matter what color they may be, they all taste like a big swig of corn syrup.

But kids still ran wildly all over the lawn tromping on the tulips and screaming each time they spotted one of the disgusting little nodules. They thought it was their duty to eat them.

Everybody knows they’ll be nauseous at some point on Easter. It’s part of the tradition. Sick­eningly sweet or rubber-ball boiled, everybody eats too many.

Boiled Easter eggs are pretty disgusting. The whites are clammy. Yuk. The yellows are runny or hard, depending on whether the kids forgot them in the pot until the water boiled away or couldn’t wait to dip them in the dye. The shells invariably crack, turning the inside of the egg red or blue to match its skin. It looks inedible and it is, but hey, it’s tradition. Tongues turn lavender and bilious chartreuse.

I looked around the store for more Easter paraphernalia. I found peanut butter eggs. I found caramel eggs and jelly bean eggs. I didn’t actually find anything that tasted better than the candy eggs of yore. Most children under the age of 2 think the tastiest Easter item in the basket is the pink plastic grass. They’re on to something there. Happy Easter.

DONNA FIELDER can be reached at 940-566-6885. Her e-mail address is dfielder@dentonrc.com.