An Easter Tradition

Yes, I know it is the wrong time of the year for this, but I don't care!

When I was about 6 I visited my uncle and Aunt for Easter. They had a tradition that I just loved.

We went for a walk on a forest trail, with my uncle in the lead and my family and my aunt and my cousins following a distance behind him. As we walked, us kids would find foil covered chocolate eggs that the Easter Bunny had dropped out of his basket as he was delivering his eggs! We were so excited about this. The weirdest thing was though, that if one of us ran ahead to talk to my uncle, there wouldn't be any eggs anymore. Once we were all back behind him, we'd start finding them again. Because of this I started watching my uncle carefully and that's when I noticed he was putting his hands in his coat pocket and dropping the eggs on the ground. So that's how I figured out what was going on.

When my kids were young my husband and I did the same thing. We'd go to a national park (so there wouldn't be any dog droppings on the ground) and they'd find chocolate eggs everywhere. David Jones makes the nicest multi-colored eggs that don't have any logos on them, so we always used them. Fun thing was, as the kids were collecting the chocolates, they'd give them to me to hold, giving me a chance to pass them on to my husband so he could drop them again! The result was that the egg hunt went on for the whole length of the walk. Of course by the end the eggs were a bit worse for wear, but that's OK, my kids didn't really like chocolate anyway, so we gave them some we had held back from the package. Either way, it's lots of fun for us, as well as the kids.

Another thing my Aunt and Uncle did was to hide Easter baskets in the sand dunes behind the house for my cousins and us to find. Funny, we should have tried that as a well, but I never thought of it. Well, maybe the next generation can carry on that tradition.....