Easter Suprise

As a young child, holiday traditions abounded in my family even if I wasn’t aware of them at the time. Every year at Easter we placed the same Easter baskets out lined with plastic, green imitation hay and waited for it to be filled with candy the next morning. My favorite candy besides the duck and rabbit sweet tarts was the pink and yellow marshmallow bunnies. They didn’t come in the multiple colors of today, and it didn’t really matter because I preferred pink (still do).

We would also dye Easter eggs in these old green coffee cups that my mother would pull out of the cabinet for the occasion. Nothing fancy, just large ceramic coffee mugs. We’d boil water and drop food coloring into the water and wait for the eggs to brighten into colorful creations.

I’ve continued these traditions with my children, except I have these egg dying cups we usually use because of the absence of coffee cups. I don’t drink coffee, so who needs coffee cups? Usually I buy some cheap decorating kit that comes with the dye as well as some of kind of decoration for the eggs. Colorful eggs are not enough for my children who want stickers and tattoos and anything else flashy that the store puts in a box for the occassion. This year the kit came with these plastic collapsible dye cups, and I figured what the heck. They looked pretty cool, and the children thought that since it came with the kit, we had to use them. More importantly, it would save time in digging out the cups from heaven knows where I’d stored them last year.

Big mistake. Huge mistake.

The cups were supposed to stand up with the water, dye, and eggs. And though I followed the instructions down to putting newspaper beneath the cups, the newspaper was no help as the cups collapsed, spilling their contents everywhere.

The tradition calls for colorful Easter eggs, not festive cabinets, floors, and counter tops.

I ditched the collapsible cups, pulled out the old plastic ones, and began ruining towels as I cleaned up the dye.

The children got their Easter eggs, and I now have cabinets that need to be repainted to cover their pastel hues. The children felt certain that they would never see dyed Easter eggs again as I mopped up pinks and oranges. Maybe my mother knew what she was doing. I’ll be looking for some coffee cups next year instead of whatever cool way of doing it comes packaged in a box.