The Easter Bunny

Everyone loved the Easter Bunny. "What a fine little chap" they would say as he busied himself hiding eggs in gardens and back yards across the land.
He was so well thought of that he had songs and poems written about him. He had also appeared on high value postage stamps in Finland, was a close confidant of King Juan Carlos of Spain, and had been voted best loved personality every year for fifteen years running by The Chocolate Manufacturers Guild.
Yes, everyone loved The Easter Bunny - except the chickens. They hated him.

As far as the chickens were concerned eggs were their business, and the Easter Bunny - cute and fluffy as he may be - had no right to muscle in on their territory. If anyone was going to hide eggs it should be them. Rabbits and eggs indeed! The idea was absurd.
They started a campaign to regain their rights.

To be fair to the chickens, they did have a strong case, and it was logical that egg laying poultry had more claim on egg related issues than non-egg laying rodents.
They hen-pecked the powers that be until they were given the sole rights to worldwide egg secretion. As a result, although the Easter Bunny had managed to hang on to the film and TV rights he nevertheless found himself out of a job.

Now the Easter Bunny had been hiding eggs for all of his life, as had his father and grandfather before him. He knew nothing else.
They sent him on a course to retrain as a missing sock retriever, but his heart was not in it. While the lecturer was droning on about the importance of sock shade, Bunny would be staring out of the window day-dreaming of hiding eggs behind trees. Some might say that it was an obsession on his part, but he had been bred to do it, and the thought of life without eggs was unbearable to him.
He began to sneak into supermarkets and take the eggs from the shelf and hide them behind the freezer that contained the fish fingers.
During the evening, he would creep undetected into restaurants and move the eggs from the fridge and put them into the pockets of the jackets that hung on the coat rack. He knew that he was doing wrong, but he couldn't help it.
People began to get annoyed with him. Every time you left a restaurant and put your hand in your pocket for your car keys it would come out covered in runny egg.
They demanded that something be done, and so the Police came and arrested the Easter Bunny.

He was brought before the magistrate and found guilty of unlawful egg rearrangement, and sent to prison. The magistrate also told him that if he was naughty again it would be rabbit stew time. For a rabbit this was dire news indeed.

The thing about Easter is that it arrives all of a sudden without you expecting it. A bit like the 6th Panzer Grenadier Division.
It certainly caught the chickens off guard. They had not thought out the logistics of hiding eggs, and they had not realized that their lack of paws prevented them from transporting them.
Once the eggs had been laid, the chickens did what chickens do, and sat on them.
Unlike other years when you really had to search hard to find hidden eggs in your garden, now all you needed to do was locate a chicken and lift it up, and underneath you would find the eggs. As chickens by dint of their size were easier to spot than eggs, things became too easy and all of the fun went out of it.
People became disheartened. What had once been a mildly interesting afternoon, now became a dull ten minutes.
The chickens weren't over happy either. Every five minutes someone would be lifting them up and peering underneath them. I mean, how would you like it. There you are sitting nice and quiet, when all of a sudden, someone grabs you by the throat, lifts you off the floor and either takes away what you were sitting on or looks up your bottom!

Chickens are rarely happy at the best of times, and now they demanded that the Easter Bunny be released from prison. As far as they were concerned, he could have his old job back with pleasure. They clucked and moaned until their demands were met.

Now rabbits aren't just good at hiding eggs. They are good at other things as well. (No not that!) and when the prison guards opened the cell door, they found that the cell was empty save for a rabbit hole in the middle of the floor.
The temptation to hide eggs had been too great for the Easter Bunny, and he had started to tunnel to freedom.
They shouted down the rabbit hole that if he came back they would release him and give him his job back.
The Easter Bunny heard them, but he also remembered the magistrate's words.
Breaking out of prison was a serious crime and he didn't want to be served up as someone's dinner. He kept burrowing away until he emerged not very far away from your back garden.

This Easter, he'll be back, hiding eggs in gardens and back yards, but you will never see him. He is careful now, and no longer trusts what people say, and he is afraid of the stew pot.