When
your friends and neighbors in the Bible Belt have decided you're a
heathen (a class that includes vegans, people who meditate, all
Moderate Republicans and a large cross-section of everybody) you can
depend their giving you sincere, heartfelt advice. Or reminders. Or
lessons. And all this goodwill can come from the most random of
places. For instance, on the Sunday before Easter, I spied a
billboard -- a really big, dramatic billboard -- along the
interstate with this life lesson: "The Easter bunny did not rise
from the dead." True confession: Before now, the Easter Bunny
and Lazarus never crossed my mind at the same time.
I can accept their
resurrection premise. It's neat, unambiguous and everything was
spelled correctly. But the Billboard Sign Person missed something
sort of important here.
The Easter Bunny, you must
understand, cannot rise from the dead because the Easter Bunny does
not die. He, or she, hibernates in the attic for 11 months with Santa
Claus, who is definitely a he. They live at the top of the
hide-a-stairs, in the attic above the hallway. Every year sometime
around March, occasionally February depending on where the Moon
happens to be, which is sort of occultist when you think about it,
The Bunny descends from the dark recesses of the upstairs with
baskets of slowly rotting wicker and last year's plastic grass.
Unless, of course, The Easter Bunny's parents are the type who trek
to the store and replace The Bunny's supplies with brand new baskets
made by godless Communist slave labor in China.
Not-Dead Easter Bunny then
delivers eggs, which will die without any hope of redemption
after their Use By date. Candy might sit around for months, but the
eggs cannot. My folks invested in plastic eggs after the Easter Egg
Hunt Disaster of 1974. That's when they learned the hard way that the
living room is no place for an egg hunt. The kids never find them all
and the adults can't remember where they hid them. My dear granny
found a colorful boiled egg underneath her living room sofa --
sometime in late May. The noxious smell made her home toxic. No
matter how many windows she opened, it wouldn't go away. My mom
fished the egg out and declared on the spot that all future egg hunts
would be conducted outside, where the fetid aroma would not drive
anyone tot madness.
The Bunny's dyed eggs are
multi-purpose and make great food. If you are the sort of family who
gathers for Easter dinner regardless of your heathen status, your
hidden eggs are turned into -- and this is really unfortunate --
deviled eggs. It's a secret best kept in the family. But that
could be the least of your problems. Your guests may question the
quality of those eggs because they have a diseased color. Unless
we're talking about an assortment of vegetables, most people avoid
any food that is green, especially when they know it should be a
soft, eggshell white. Same goes for pink, the color of no known food
besides grapefruit and a definite shade of certain fungi.
The same disclaimers go for
Santa and that other sinister beast, The Halloween. It's probably the
worst because adults have taken it over, replacing candy and princess
costumes with Jell-O shots and the Tomahawk Hottie. The Halloween can
get you into all sorts of theological trouble.
So try a little tenderness
for The Bunny in the attic, but keep an eye on the deviled eggs. You
never know what sort off Easter mischief they might try to cook up,
bless their little pink and purple selves.
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