Fun Monday - Hoppin' Down the Bunny Trail

Fun Monday has rolled around again, and given the name of the blog hosting this week, the assignment shouldn't surprise you much... Jeanna at the Wisconsin Candy Dish set forth this challenge:

The topic is Easter Baskets: Share a story, is it better to give or to receive, what would you like in yours?

I actually have TWO stories for you from my childhood.

When I was little, we participated in Easter egg hunts both at church and staged by parents and my grandmother. Once we'd found our eggs, we would amuse ourselves by taking turns re-hiding our eggs and letting the other siblings hunt for them. Over the course of the day, it was easy to misplace one or two, but since there were so many eggs, we never worried about them that much. Besides, after a week of eating hard-boiled eggs at breakfast, lunch or dinner in one form or another, it was a good year before we wanted to see hard-boiled eggs again.

We were living in a little fairytale cottage house when my brother John found a gorgeous blue egg in one of the flowering bushes mid-summer. Thinking it an abandoned bird egg, he took it in to the basement under the house, dug a hole in the dirt embankment and proceeded to sit on the egg to keep it warm until it hatched. It must have been a few hours later when he felt the call of nature and he called Jerry into the basement to take care of the egg while he went to answer the call. Jerry was very happy to sit the egg - in fact, had been a little jealous that John had found it and thought to hatch it out. So John got up, and Jerry sat down - hard.

I cannot describe to you the smell that filled the basement and the rest of the house that day. I have no idea how old that egg really was, as we'd been living in that house for a couple of years by then. But a word of advice to you Easter Bunnies out there. Count your eggs. And make sure ALL of them are found. Otherwise, you too could have a very smelly summer.


The second story also involves my brothers.

At some point, we realized that there really wasn't such a thing as the Easter Bunny. That the baskets of candy actually came from the parents. So one year, we decided to get a basket for THEM.

At the time, my dad was selling radio air time to various local businesses, so he was well known in the business sector and had lots of clients. One of them was Brown's Pharmacy. And Brown's was close to home, so we could get there without parental assistance.

John, Jerry and I got up very early Easter morning and rode our bikes to Brown's Pharmacy to purchase an easter basket. Being very young, we had no concept of "business hours." We just knew that it was open whenever we went, so we were shocked and dismayed to find a CLOSED sign hanging on the door.

"Now what are we going to do???" asked John as he leaned on the door. And the door opened up and John fell inside. And the alarm began blaring. There was a moment of panic between me, John, and Jerry. We debated getting the basket and going, but quickly discarded that idea. We wound up waiting for the police to arrive - after all, we hadn't done anything wrong - just leaned on the door. It wasn't our fault that it wasn't locked.

The police called our parents and the owner of the pharmacy. We tried to not explain to Mom and Dad what we were doing there at 7am on Easter Morning, but they got it out of us anyway. Mr. Brown showed up and was actually grateful to us and was quite relieved that it wasn't a thief that had tripped the alarm, but a bunch of kids looking to buy an easter basket. As a reward for our honesty, he allowed us to come in and pick any easter basket we wanted.

I don't remember what it looked like or what was in it, but we got that Easter basket for Mom and Dad and had a very nice Easter after all.

UPDATE!!!!!

My memory isn't what it used to be... Thanks to my brother John (a sharper knife in the drawer), there are a few corrections to my story:

Hey, Sayre-

Gotta correct a few things-The egg/nest in the basement:Jerry took the egg out the chopping block where Dad used to do the firewood and bounced on it HARD, butt first. I was actually there to witness the event because it was not the call of nature, but boredom that made me ask Jerry if he knew a better way to do this. There was no anger or tears about this because we all found the immediate putrid smell hysterically funny.

The Brown's Pharmacy incident was not nearly so tame. we actually walked right in and started shopping because there was a light back in the pharmacy window. We thought they were open, so we just started shopping. It was the increasingly loud burglar alarm that made us go outside to see what was going on. Then we were terrified, but there were no police. I had to go across the street and fetch the squad car that was enjoying an ice cream cone at Little Johnny's Ice Cream Parlor. I have no idea how they didn't hear that alarm!The rest is as I remember it. :)

John

Now go visit the other participants in Fun Monday - Wisconsin Candy Dish has the list over on her blog!