This is the first year that my children aren’t getting an Easter basket. It’s not because they are too old for an Easter basket that I’m not giving them one, even though they are too old, at 18 and 16 (and already several years past the eye-rolling stage). I’m fully capable of presenting a grown adult child — or niece or nephew — with a pastel-wrapped explosion of chocolate, bunny pajamas from Roller Rabbit, sour lollies, orange gumballs presented in orange-paper cones to look like carrots, and novelty-trick “chewing gum” that, with a concealed spring, snaps shut on the victim’s finger as a disappointing surprise. I’m not giving the kids Easter baskets this year because of logistics. They have too much stuff and I can’t fit it all in my car.
Nettie will be coming home from college on May 8, and I’m already concerned about how I’ll cram all her giant, puffy cotton hoodies and decorative, color-coordinated throw pillows into my Honda. Teddy won’t be home until June, but he has about four tons of sports equipment in his dorm room up in New Hampshire, and meanwhile has never eaten his Easter candy, ever, even when he was 4 or 5 years old. The kid doesn’t like sweets! How did I raise a child who won’t eat holiday candy? Year in and year out, his entire basket would sit at the foot of his bed, days and then weeks passing, during which the cat would play boxing games with the crinkly cellophane and the ribbon, strewing green-paper strands of faux grass all around the room and upstairs hall.
(Eventually, as April turns to May each spring, I deconstruct Teddy’s basket and bring the chocolate rabbit and malted-milk robin’s eggs into my own bedroom, where I slowly gnaw from the ears down, watching British television series. But the jelly beans and gummy candies, which I don’t like much, myself, have eventually gotten carelessly stuffed each May or June into the candy jar in the pantry, where they remain — ritual relics — until the cycle of “my son doesn’t eat candy” is repeated at Halloween.)
Hint to parents: It’s possible that over-offering treats — continually finding excuses to urge upon the wee ones armloads of holiday peppermints, candy canes, candy corns, Charms Blow Pops in summer, and white-ganache-covered Birthday Cake Oreos on their birthdays — is the secret to raising children who won’t eat candy. It’s the trick. My son won’t even eat dessert.
Well, it’s Holy Week here at the Presbyterian Church, where I have a day job as administrator (a.k.a., as I like to call myself, the church lady with the candy dish on her desk), and it’s possible that some of the deacons and elders have begun to notice my propensity for overdoing it on holidays. First, I casually snuck a dried-flower-wreath craft project, for the youth group, into the budget for the community Thanksgiving decorating back in November, in harvest colors of goldenrod and marigold. Then I went a little over the top with the festooning of tables with red-and-white, gift-wrapped pretend parcels for the Christmas tea. And now, for Easter, I might possibly have ordered rose-colored gauze table runners and an extra dozen cheap purple, green, and yellow straw baskets for the Sunday morning egg hunt.
Writing this, it occurs to me that I might be casting myself in the category of aging eccentric lady with this admission of over-Eastering. Am I akin to the blowsy dame in large floral prints who, once she finds her nest has emptied of actual children, presses her maternal impulses on her Pekingese dog, dressing it in frocks and sun hats and pushing it around the village in a pram? Oh, well. As I always tell any friend who will listen when we are psychoanalyzing one another and pointing out others’ personality flaws, at least I’m not stingy. When it comes to sins, I still think it’s better to be the pusher of egg-shaped chocolate-covered marshmallows than the one who snatches candy from the hands of babes.