A discarded shoe box made do, and was filled with clean
grass. It was then placed by the end of our beds in readiness. Sleep
didn't come easily on Easter night, but in the morning we woke to find
that the Easter Bunny had left one sugar egg for each of us children
in our grass and shoe box nests. Unlike the chocolate eggs of today
the first sugar eggs we received were not large, and probably were only
about five inches long. They were however five inches of sheer delight.
Usually pink on one side and white or yellow on the other, they were
joined around the middle by piped sugar, and on top lay a small piped
flower which was added by way of decoration.
Both the egg and the piping were
as hard flint, which made the task of biting it extremely difficult,
but by the same token this prolonged the enjoyment, as it was simply
not possible to eat a whole egg in one day. Inside the egg rattled a
few little sweet favors and so the idea was to keep the two pieces
of the egg intact by biting off the sugar piping, and then find the
favors on which were written little messages, then lastly to attack
the two halves of the egg in small sections. If one was careful an egg
could last a week, especially if one hid the pieces from one's siblings.
By the next Easter sugar rationing
was lifted and the array of Easter Eggs was just stunning. On the shelves
of the local delicatessen we saw expensive boxed ones with an open front
and whole scenes of little bunnies, grass and flowers all manufactured
out of sugar, nestling inside. Then there were smaller ones with a hole
cut in the front of the egg, to show the tiny figure of a fairy dancing
inside. The hole was decorated with ruffled lace adding nothing to the
eating but making the entire confection something that every little
girl desired with her whole heart. I just longed to have one of those
beautiful fairy eggs.
My parents, who owned the delicatessen,
however, said that my brothers and I could only have any stock that
was left over from the sales on Easter Saturday. So much for Easter
Bunny! It was a year or so later that chocolate eggs arrived on the
market, all covered in colored silver paper, and in many different
shapes and sizes. It was exciting when the Easter Rabbits appeared on
the market. The downside of course was the fact that one Easter Rabbit
could be consumed in a single sitting, whether or not one had a tummy
ache at the end of it. Then there were the little multi-colored mini
eggs that sold for something like a penny each and that helped to fill
many a child's bunny nest.
When my children were little I made
Easter Eggs for them out of chocolate, and decorated them with piped
flowers, chickens and bunnies. My three boys thought their eggs were
wonderful and still remember them. The sense of satisfaction that making
my own eggs gave me was tremendous, and of course saved us quite a bit
of money as the more fancy figures of Easter Bunny all wrapped in colored
foil and displayed in printed boxes were costly to acquire. The best
times we had with Easter Eggs was during our Easter camping weekends,
whether at the seaside or down along the Coorong in South Australia,
when the boys could hollow a little nest in the sand outside the tent
and line it with soft grass in readiness for Easter Bunny.
In Australia we have been trying
for years to rid the countryside of rabbits that destroy the ecology
of whole regions of the country. The chocolate manufacturers and wildlife
experts have banded together in a campaign to education the population
to accept a native animal as a replacement for Easter rabbits, and for
this purpose they have chosen a Bilby. This little creature is small
and furry, with a pointed snout and big ears. In its own way it is not
dissimilar to a rabbit, but it is not a rabbit, in that it does not
burrow in the same way as the feral rabbit population. Therefore the
Bilby is an acceptable replacement for a rabbit, but I think the Easter
Bunny being entrenched in Easter folklore and is resisting dislodgement. But we all like decorated Easter Eggs.
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