This started the other night when Jimmy Kimmel had built a Peeps gun
and was shooting Peeps out into his late night TV audience.
Peeps are kind of an iconic waste product that comes out in
marketing every Easter and most people I believe are not fond of them other than
for their nostalgic value from childhood. Biting into one of them is the oral equivalent I think of listening to the screeching of a piece of chalk on a chalk board.
They come in colors now. They used to be many decades ago only
yellow and decorated my Easter morning basket.
One each I think we got. The whole Easter basket thing is another
thing I as a parent recreated to a younger generation without much appreciation
for the hand me tradition thing.
Stepping back a few weeks before Easter in my youth in the last
century was the nuns in the grade school issuing every child from grade 1 to 8
an Easter Egg Gambling punch card thing where for a nickel or a dime you sold a
box, a circle with a designated name.
The lucky person who had the winning name
revealed after you sold all your peeled away red dots would be revealed behind
the big red circle at the top of the gambling card.
These cards, along with Bingo were a very Catholic thing to raise
funds for the school and or parish and under no circumstances could be
confessed in the confessional as the sin of gambling. There was a special dispensation for it of
course!
The prize(?) was a coconut crème Easter egg with its dense
confection surrounded by dark milk chocolate.
The appeal of these eggs I believe was with the older generations and strangely
too with my older siblings who could not get enough of them when chopped up
with some difficulty with a big butcher knife from the kitchen.
I usually gave my coconut crème egg away in
pieces, not desperate enough personally to consume more than just the first awful
taste of it.
Luckily when I reached eight or nine, they now had hollow chocolate
bunnies in boxes which my parents let me have in lieu of the coconut crème thing. No doubt the hollow bunnies, new to the
market then, were cheaper to purchase.
The baskets with filled with the usual colored hard boiled eggs,
decorated the previous day on Saturday with a egg coloring kit, color fizzy
tablets, wax crayon and wire loop egg holder that cost a dime everywhere in the
neighborhood stores.
The real thing about chocolate that I loved in my basket was with the
Hershey Kisses which were rationed to like a half dozen. The whole product was
expensive and marketed differently back then. Quality not quantity and coming
in a small cellophane bag.
So now, we have the Peep, chocolate hollow bunny, Hershey kisses.
Of course, there were jelly beans in an improvised aluminum foil shaped cup and
the thing I loved most was the chocolate covered marshmallow eggs wrapped in
colored silver foil which my father purchased special in a store off of K &
A south in one of those stores with steps leading up into the storefront of an
old house.
I believe he may have been purchasing the foil covered chocolate
marshmallows at the same place since his youth. Of all the things in the sacred
Easter basket, this purchase and these handmade marshmallow eggs with the most preciously
thought of by all.
That into a basket with plastic colored hay. Each of us had a
reserved color and I cannot remember my specific color at the moment.
One other thing, the baskets themselves, used every year and made of
natural materials looked their age and use. My father would go to the local
Easter Flower stand selling Easter plants, the kind you gave to your
grandmother, and he would purchase the colored aluminum foil sheets used to
wrap and decorate clay pots holding the seasonal plants. This foil, again
following the color reserved theme, got wrapped onto tired old wicker Easter
baskets.
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