In preparation for Easter, I bought plastic eggs, purple papered grass, and, of course, a basket. Because that’s what Easter is about, right?
For our family, since we’re not religious, that is what it is about.
This year, for the first time, I noticed that Easter is being marketed like Christmas. For example, I never heard of an Easter gift basket before, and I grew up with a Catholic grandmother. Every year we would go to her rural country home to eat ham (except I don’t digest ham so she would make something different for me.) As for gift baskets, we just had Easter eggs, which we had to find ourselves, in the dirt, behind bushes and trees. Now when I walk down the seasonal aisle I see pencils and trinkets and toys that are supposed to go inside Easter baskets. Why, exactly, are we putting gifts inside easter baskets? And we don’t even have to work for them?
“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas….”
The basket, eggs, and fake grass were all relatively easy to find. It was finding things to put inside the Easter eggs that proved challenging. Originally I wanted chocolate morsels and jelly beans, but I was truly taken aback by how difficult it has been to find plain candy without artificial flavorings, colorings, or an inch worth of ingredients I can’t pronounce.
How difficult is it to make chocolate taste good? What, exactly, needs to be added? How about just milk and sugar?
I went looking for some chocolates in several different grocery and drug stores in my area and was truly surprised, in this “green” day and age, to not see any. I finally resorted to going to Whole Foods, where I found a 6 inch bag of candy, no artificial colors or flavors, selling for…. $13.
Well, that is beyond what I am willing to pay. I have to fill 40 eggs.
Someone told me that Target has a section of natural “candy,” but I actually learned that today, on Easter Sunday.
I resorted to putting nuts (macadamia, pecans and walnuts) and chocolate chips inside the Easter eggs, in varying order, as well as a few Easter themed erasers that I plan to reuse next year.
It worked. The nuts and chocolate chips were a success.
