As we approach another Easter, my religious side feels joy and gratitude that my savior Jesus Christ gave himself for me so that I could live forever with Him.
But the kid in me always thinks about coloring Easter eggs. You might have dyed Easter eggs when you were younger, but I grew up in West Virginia, and we didnt dye Easter eggs – we colored them. It was an annual tradition in my house that I eventually grew out of. But I’ll always remember the times I spent coloring eggs with my family.
We were a Paas family. Paas meant quality. Dudley’s brand seemed too ridiculous and cheap. Maybe I just couldn’t get past Dudley’s goofy face. When I was younger, the Dudley mascot looked really goofy. The interwebs have failed me, or I could provide you with a picture. Just imagine a really dopey-looking rabbit. Got that picture in your head? Good. Apparently even the Dudley’s folks agreed with me, since Dudley now looks a lot more like his Paas competition counterpart.
Besides, the standard Paas kit had many egg decorating options. Of course, there were the traditional color tablets which had to be dissolved in a mixture of hot water and vinegar. That always kind of stunk, and made the process a little less enjoyable. (Vinegar always makes me think of the school lunch days when they would serve spinach with these little vinegar shakers. GROSS. But, I digress). Also, I was never fully satisfied with the deepness of the hues given by these tablets, so many times I would add some of my mom’s food coloring to the batch in order to get a more vibrant shade of red, blue, or whatever. The Paas kit came with this weird kind of hexagonal dipping wand that you had to bend in order to use it to dip eggs. I never liked using this device, and instead always used the far superior tool of a teaspoon.
You could also put stickers on your eggs (mostly secular Easter stuff, but there were a few fancy crosses if you were feeling particularly religious). I was never a big sticker fan, since they looked a little cheap and tore easily. Also, putting a flat sticker on a rounded surface had mixed results. Properly placed, the stickers worked. But one wrinkle and the egg was no longer what it could have been. Besides, the traditional dyed egg with no frills was always my favorite.
Another option was writing on your egg with a clear wax crayon before dipping it into the dye. The point of this was to write a message that would not be dyed like the rest of the egg. Popular choices included your name, or a happy face. While this idea was appealing in theory, it had two major flaws. The first (and most obvious) was that you had to use a clear crayon to write a message on a white egg. Thus, it was almost impossible to see what you were writing, or what you had already written. The result was an illegible scrawl that I often ended up regretting. Sometimes it worked, but more often than not it didn’t. The second flaw was that to use the crayon you had to apply a great deal of pressure to the fragile eggshell. This could sometimes lead to cracking the egg, and (as far as I was concerned) ruining it, as the inevitable dent and spider web design that resulted was a constant reminder of my clumsy failure.
A fourth option was a kind of “shrink-wrap” that you could wrap around your egg and dip it into boiling water. The wrap would then shrink down and stick to the sides of the egg. This worked well, but you had to choose whether you wanted to dye the egg or shrink-wrap it. If you dyed the egg first, then shrink-wrapped it, the most of the dye would come off and you were left with a pathetic-looking, pale shrink-wrapped egg. If you shrink-wrapped the egg and then dyed it, you would end up dying the shrink-wrap along with the egg, ruining the shrink-wrap images.
One year we were bored with Paas, so instead we experimented with getting a generic “tie-dyed” kit to color our eggs. This was an absolute debacle. The process involved putting each egg into this box with colored dye on the inside of the box (different colors on each wall). The next step in the process was to shake the box in order to spread the color onto the eggs. Needless to say, this did not work well. We ended up cracking many of the eggs (due to violent shaking), and after awhile the cardboard box started to tear due to the excessive moisture, and we ended up with a broken egg and a stained kitchen floor. Overall, it was just a bad idea with a flawed execution.
When I was younger, after a few days of enjoying the eggs, I would eat the eggs. I thought it was neat that the egg white was now dyed along with the outer shell. Of course, I would never eat the yolk, since they always looked like some kind of disgusting crumbly Superball. No thank you.
Sometimes my brother and I would take turns hiding eggs around our yard. The problem was that we could never remember where we hid them all, and eventually we would lose half of them and get bored of playing the game. Once, our dog eventually found one of the eggs that we had forgotten. Sadly, by the time she found the egg, it had gone rotten and stunk to high heaven. It must have smelled great to her, though, since she had rolled around in it and thus smelled like some dog/skunk hybrid. She got a bath that day.
Though I have long outgrown this activity, I have an eight-year-old nephew who is just getting started, so I am sure I will have a few more years of coloring Easter eggs ahead of me.
