Easter on Eagle Street

Easter was fun for us kids. Mom and Dad went all out to make sure we had a great time.  Unlike every other family I knew, we did not go on Easter egg hunts.  Because at our house, the Easter Bunny did not just hide the eggs--he hid the entire Easter basket.  Peter Cottontail, better known as the Easter Bunny, would come to our house while we were sleeping and hide our baskets somewhere in the house.  Then when we woke up on Easter morning, we would go searching everywhere to find them.  The rules were simple: You knew what your basket looked like because you had the same one every year and it had your name on it. Mine was the pink basket for many years.  If you happened upon someone else's basket, you were required to leave it alone and not say anything.

On the day before Easter, someone was tasked with going down to the scary basement to retrieve the Easter box.  This box contained all of our baskets, colorful plastic grass, and plastic eggs that would hold candies. After the little kids were in bed, Mom would get out her electric egg cooker.  It would hard boil seven eggs at a time.  She would cook two or three dozen eggs, then she would color them using the Paas egg color kit and some vinegar.

This was the exact model of Mom's egg cooker

Mom spent the 40 days of Lent stowing away Easter candy. She hid everything underneath piles of clothing in her closet.  We kids loved Easter candy, because it was special and only available during this time of year. It wasn't just everyday stuff like M & M's  or Reece's rewrapped in pastel colors like they do now. Here is a partial list of our seasonal treats:

60's Easter candy that was in our baskets every year

Peeps (which were usually just yellow, I liked them, but most of the kids did not)
Brach's jelly bird eggs (we all hated the licorice flavor)
Malted milk robin's eggs (pastel colors with flecks.  Also called Fiesta eggs at one time)
Brach's Marshmallow eggs (hard candy coating, softer chewy white inside, also known as Easter egg hunt eggs, and are now hard to find because most stores don't carry them anymore.  If I could still find them, I would eat them until they were all gone)
Big hollow Chocolate Bunnies (fun to bite off their ears)
Chocolate covered Marshmallow Bunnies
Chocolate covered Marshmallow eggs (packaged in a egg carton.  Mom loved these)
Brach's chocolate covered eggs with soft fillings like Maple, Fruit and Nut, and Vanilla  (the gateway candy to See's Chocolates. These wouldn't last 2 minutes in my basket)

On the night before Easter, after the kids were in bed, Mom would bring out all of these candies and divvy them up between all the baskets, then she would nestle a few hard boiled colored eggs in the plastic grass. Back in the day, you didn't get sick from eating an egg that had been sitting out all night long. Sometimes she would add a special gift like a tiny wind-up duck,  a fuzzy little toy chick or bunny, (I still have my bunny, he is in the first photo) or a new coloring book and crayons.  Then Mom, and Dad if he wasn't at work, would figure out good hiding places for each kid's basket. The level of difficulty in finding it would be based on the kid's age.

Lucky Tammy, age 2, found a real Manx kitten in her basket under Mom's crafts desk. 

Easter morning was fun, fun, fun!  We kids would be running around the house looking in closets, pawing through the clothes in laundry baskets, opening the kitchen cupboards, searching everywhere until we found our basket.  For a little kid, the basket would be in an easy place,  behind Dad's chair, for example.  Or:

At age three, finding my basket underneath Mom's Hammond organ

As we got older, it took longer to find it. If we searched for more than 30 minutes with no success, Mom would start throwing out hints to get us on the right track.  Once we all found our baskets, we would immediately isolate our favorite things to eat right off the bat or to hide so that no one else would grab them when we weren't looking.  Mom would encourage us to peel and eat at least one of our real eggs before we would start in on the candyfest.  The last time my basket was hidden was Easter 1971, Dad's last Easter.  I had a really hard time finding the basket, and needed a hint from Mom.  I finally found it in the poolroom, wrapped in a plastic bag, sitting up on the top of the pool slide.  Little Jeffrey's basket was found inside the clothes dryer in the kitchen.

A 70's Easter morning.  Candy and coloring for breakfast!

For me, Easter meant going to church services  at the Mission Hills Congregational Church.  As I got dressed for church, Mom would sing an old song about wearing an Easter Bonnet at the Easter Parade.  A couple times, she actually made me wear a crazy hat and some gloves because in her day, that's what the ladies did on Easter.   I did see fancy hats on the older women in the pews on Easter, but I think I was the only little girl who carried on the tradition, and nobody was wearing gloves anymore. I hated it, but I wore them, because it didn't occur to me that I could have stowed them somewhere on my five block walk to church, and then retrieve them later on my way home. Mom wouldn't have ever known, because I was the only one in the family who went to church on Easter back in the sixties.

Yes, I had to show up at church looking like this

Here is Lynda's favorite Easter story from when she was a kid in the fifties:

"One year there was a great hunt that I will never forget. Even though we all knew the simple rule, Tim disregarded etiquette.  He always found everyone else's basket and ruined the search for the rest of us.  He truly took the fun out of the search.  Only little Darwin's basket could never be revealed--it was always hidden where he would find it right away.

One year, Dad decided that Tim was too old to get a basket and he was tired of him taking the fun away from the rest of us kids.  That year, Tim was not allowed to look for his basket until the rest of us found ours, and whoever found Tim's was not allowed to tell, or else they would forfeit their own basket.

After we had all found our baskets and were going through them, Tim, who had to wait and watch all this time, was pretty upset. As he started searching, Dad was smiling a sly smile, certain that Tim would never find it. After looking for hours without any luck, Tim was convinced that he didn't really have one.  And the rest of us were enjoying every minute of his pain. None of us had come across his basket when we were looking for our own baskets, so we had no idea where it was hidden.  Dad finally asked Tim if he gave up, and he said he had.  Then Dad made him agree that if he were to get clues of hot, warm, and cold, to help him find it, Tim would have to play by the rules in the future and leave our baskets alone.  He agreed.

Tim started out looking in the kitchen, where he heard "COLD!" than went on to each room only to hear, "COLD" and "VERY COLD."  He made it to the living room and he heard, "WARM!"  Tim perked up, with new life in his face, and started walking around, he heard, "WARMER!"  Now all of us kids were interested in this search and for the time being forgot about our candy in order to watch Tim as he made progress.

When he got near the fireplace, he heard, "OH, VERY, VERY, WARM!" We were all in suspense, Where was it? Tim looked in the fireplace, and Dad called out, "WATCH IT, YOU WILL GET BURNED!" Tim knew it had to be really close, but where?  He then stuck his head in the fireplace and looked up, and there it was!  The night before, Dad had gone up on the roof and dropped a rope down the chimney.  Then Mom tied a knot around the basket handle, and Dad had pulled the rope up the chimney so that just the bottom of the Easter basket could be seen if you carefully looked inside the fireplace.  Tim found it, but he wasn't cheerful about it.  He was pretty mad and said how unfair it was to hide it there.  He felt it was a dirty trick.

The rest of us were quite pleased that Tim finally got what was due to him.  For some reason, Tim never got in trouble or was blamed for anything.  He could do no wrong and always got his way. So it was satisfying to see him humbled a bit that morning.  The Easter Bunny sure got him good that year.  And for the record, that WAS Tim's last Easter Basket on Eagle Street."

Great story, Lynda!

After Dad passed away in 1971, our Easter fun was toned down a bit.   Mom gave me the opportunity to prepare the eggs, and fill and hide the baskets for the two youngest kids.  As we all grew up,  our tradition gradually faded away.  But Lynda and I will never forget our great Eagle Street Easters.