good times with my peeps... and Cadburry eggs

Tony has been recovering from a cold for a while, so last night we went to the store to get some Musilex so he can “harden the mucus and cough it out”… Yum! Anyway, we’ve been frequenting Rite Aid a lot lately due to his cold and the cold that I had last week and up until yesterday I had been good and had limited my candy perusing to the picked-over-75%-off-Valentines-day candy… but yesterday, I was on my cell phone while we were at the drug store and I inadvertently wandered into the Easter Candy aisle… and it was GLORIOUS!!!! I kept my cool though I only ended up buying 4 boxes of peeps and 2 Cadbury Cream eggs… and I only ate one Cadbury egg and 1 box of peeps last night…My self control is pretty impressive, I know.

I must say, Easter has the best candy of all of the holidays! Halloween is all about candy so you’d think that it would be the winner of the best holiday candy award, but it is not even close… for Halloween, and Christmas and Valentines day and all the other holidays they just give you the same ordinary candy that you get for the rest of the year, but they color it or wrap it differently… except at Valentines day they have those crappy hearts that say things like “u r sweet” and at Christmas there are candy canes, but those suck, so whatever.

Easter also has regular candy that is colored differently … but I think candy tastes better when it is shaped like an egg or a bunny… I really like some of the hollow bunny chocolates … and then there are chocolate truffles or chocolate with marshmallows from Sees Candies and other such places that are shaped like an egg and then have decorative sugar designs on top and they are just super good and you don’t see much sugar painting on chocolates except at Easter time… But for me the crown jewelws of Easter are: Cadbury Eggs, Peeps and Jelly Beans and oh and also those little egg cartons filled with chocolate covered marshmallow eggs… YUM…

I am a little disappointed in Peeps though ‘cause they seem to have turned into money hungry whores in recent years… now they have Halloween “peeps” shaped like pumpkins and Valentines day “peeps” shaped like hearts and Christmas” peeps” that are snowmen… but that’s just stupid… it doesn’t make sense to eat something called a “peep” unless it looks like a baby chicken… damn are those little sugary marshmallow chickens tasty though! I think it’s the sugar on top that really does it or maybe its just the light fluffiness of them… I didn’t really appreciate peeps as a young kid, but obviously I have a more refined pallet now.

Easter is also cool ‘cause you get to paint eggs and have an Easter Egg hunt. What other holiday has a built in competition? My family had a game tournament on Christmas this year (which Tony and I dominated)… but it was no where near as exciting as an egg hunt. It's like a magical sport. You get to paint eggs funky colors and then supposedly a magical bunny hides them and then you get to run around and find them so you can eat develled eggs and eat candy for the next week.

It’s pretty fun to dye the eggs, but mostly ‘cause of the anticipation of looking for them later… although we used to buy these plastic sleeves with pictures and designs on them that you put around the egg and then put in boiling water for a second and it would shrink the plastic onto the eggs and they would be perfectly decorated. I haven’t seen them for years but I though those were really cool… Hunting for Easter eggs is just awesome though! I think it should be a pro sport! Finding hidden prizes is a really rewarding feeling and also egg hunting can be more challenging than most people realize. You have to be shrewd and try not to let your fellow hunters know when you’ve seen an egg, but you still have to get to it, so you’ve got to kind of casually walk over to the area with the hidden egg and then just subtly place it in your basket.
When I was a kid I remember my brother and I running around and looking out all of the windows around our house see if we could spot any of the eggs and therefore have an advantage once we were allowed outside to start the hunt. There were certain places that there would always be an egg hidden too… like the mail box and pretty much every pot ted plant would have an egg by it. Also, my dad would always spray-paint one of the eggs gold; that was the big find. It would be hidden in a harder to find place than the other eggs and if you found a gold egg you would get to cash it in for a super prize.

My parents used to hide the chicken eggs we had decorated and also plastic eggs with candy in them. Then we could trade in all of our regular chicken eggs for plastic eggs filled with candy. If you traded in the gold egg you got a big plastic egg with better candy in it than the regular sized plastic eggs.

Every year there seemed to be at least a couple eggs that never got found though, and my parents would not remember where they had hidden them, so either one of our dogs would show up with egg shell all over her face a few days later, or in May or June we would find a cracked open plastic egg filled with slugs and stuff. Finding the slug filled one would still give me some satisfaction though ‘cause I had found an egg that was obviously really well hidden.

My bro and sister in-law were supposed to have an egg hunt with Tony and I last year, which would have been the first egg hunt I’ve had with my brother for at least 10 years, but it ended up not happening. One of these days though I’d like a rematch. I think I could definitely be a contender now.

Tony and I had an egg hunt 2 or 3 years ago. Our friend Stephanie came over and hid eggs in his apartment. I think I found about 3 times as many eggs as Tony did. He really wasn’t hustling. Indoor egg hunting isn’t as fun as doing it in a yard though ‘cause there is stuff you can break, so you can’t really run full speed or throw an elbow if you are going for the same egg at the same time as someone else. The year we had an egg hunt at Tony’s apartment, he had bought me a ring and hid it in one of the eggs. That was really really cute of him I thought.

Now that we have our own house I think we are going to have to have an off the hook Easter Egg hunt. My friend Anushka will be here for Easter… I wonder if she would rather hide the eggs or hunt against me.