Insight: Somebunny requires chocolate

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Just in case you haven’t noticed by now, Easter Sunday is just weeks away and Easter candy is disappearing from store shelves.

As a kid growing up in the 1950s, Easter for me was a bonus day for jellybeans, chocolate, and decorated eggs resting within a large basket containing cellophane green grass. For a 5-year-old on Easter Sunday in 1959, the holiday meant a day of church and dinner with relatives, but not before diving in first to sample what sugary delights that the Easter Bunny had brought me overnight.

Back then, Easter candy was rivaled only by Christmas candy found in stockings hung by the fireplace, a Whitman’s Sampler box of chocolates or a small box of conversation hearts for Valentine’s Day.

But for Easter fans like I was, the anticipation of racing downstairs to find a 2-foot solid chocolate Peter Rabbit bunny in my basket was incredible. My parents would make sure our family’s Easter baskets included a large chocolate bunny, a smaller hollow milk chocolate bunny, plenty of jellybeans, large and small malted milk robin’s eggs, a carton of yellow marshmallow Peeps, several decorated hardboiled eggs, a few chocolate gold coins and perhaps one or two buttercream eggs.

This was something I looked forward to year after year.

On the Friday or Saturday night before Easter, our family would drive to visit our cousins, Roger and Marsha, and they would have a Paas Easter egg decorating kit available to share for coloring and decorating eggs.

These were the days long before pink, orange or blue cellophane grass was sold as Easter basket grass. Cadbury creme eggs, now an Easter favorite across America, were not introduced until 1971. There were no separate bags of licorice-flavored jellybeans available and brown, red, purple, green or blue marshmallow Peeps had yet to be sold.

Sour Patch Kids Grow Up Eggs had yet to be invented. Brach’s did not release candy shelled marshmallow Easter eggs until 1963. Starburst was years away from creating chewy jellybeans. Reese’s would take at least four more decades to unveil peanut butter Easter eggs. Rice Krispies treats were made at home during the winter and not purchased at the store shaped like bunnies.

These days candy companies will market just about anything if company executives think it will yield a profit. Hence you have repurposed bags of fun-size Snickers, Three Musketeers, Jolly Ranchers and Butterfingers left over from Halloween being sold as “Easter” treats. Same thing goes for the crazy looking white- and green-colored candy corn and I say some things are better left for October than at Easter.

Some new Easter candies may catch on with the public and have a future.

While shopping for groceries last weekend, I spotted Oreo crème-filled Easter eggs, Twix-stuffed Easter eggs, and Tootsie Roll Eggs. However, I quickly bypassed bags of Twizzler, Airheads, and Laffy Taffy in brightly colored Easter packaging.

I usually dreaded the preparation on Easter Sunday for church. It meant that my father would drag his shoeshine kit out of his closet and ask me to bring him my dress shoes to polish. My mother would iron a starchy white shirt for me to wear with my brown suit and clip-on necktie. It was the only day I ever saw both my mother and my sister wear a hat and as the weather around that time of year was changing from winter to spring and we could usually arrive at the church service without wearing an overcoat.

Dressing up was nothing new for me. I attended a Catholic school, and we had to wear a uniform every day that included a shirt and tie. But at the Easter dinner gathering, it was unusual to see all the members of my family dressed up to the nines for the occasion. After dinner we weren’t allowed to change and had to be extra careful not to get grass stains or mud on our fancy clothes during the annual Easter egg hunt.

For me, I was happy when it was all over and we could return home. There I would find comfort in not having to eat another slice of ham with pineapple glazing or make special mention to my Aunt Bernice about how great her peach custard pie was.

Best of all, I could gnaw away for days at my solid chocolate Easter bunny until it was gone. Every other year or so, the Easter Bunny would substitute a small white chocolate bunny in my basket instead of a milk chocolate one. The difference never really mattered as I liked both kinds. But it did to my younger brother, who never cared for white chocolate. I could usually trade him some mellocreme eggs for his white chocolate bunny, but I would have to eat it before my mother caught on to what was happening.

As of today, there are just 23 days left until Easter Sunday. Easter for me has always unofficially marked the end of winter and the arrival of spring.

In my opinion, kids growing up these days have way too many Easter candy options and it’s a much more commercialized holiday.

Easter eggs these days just aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. <