This was about as dark as our dyed eggs ever got
I don’t remember ever going on an Easter egg hunt as a child. The Easter Bunny might have hidden some candy around our living room, but I’m not even certain of that. We had pets, plus my mother would have feared an egg getting lost behind the couch. The Easter Bunny would probably have been sensitive to those concerns.
I remember taking my three-year-old son to our church one year so he could participate in an Easter egg hunt with other kids. They ran around in the churchyard and found some candy, but I don’t remember him being focused enough or fast enough to find very much. I don’t recall ever repeating the experience.
Cousins
When we went to my in-laws for Easter, the Easter Bunny hid plastic eggs filled with treats outside in their yard. This was a much more enjoyable experience than the church egg hunt. My children and their cousins had great fun searching for all the eggs. The four of them didn’t find equal numbers of eggs, but the unfairness of this didn’t seem to matter because the fun was in the finding—once they had found the eggs the first time, they demanded that Grandpa play Easter Bunny and hide the eggs again. This went on all morning.
Of course, only the plastic eggs could be hidden again. By the second go-around, the real hard-boiled eggs were smushed. We started out with a dozen hard-boiled eggs, but only a handful survived to become egg salad.
Which is unfortunate, because I love egg salad, and I never think to make it except around Easter, when we had a bunch of hard-boiled eggs on hand to dye.
And this was about as fancy as our eggs ever got. We could do the two-tone look. And the mottled look obtained by dipping the whole egg into two different colors.
Dyeing Easter eggs was a stronger tradition in my family than hunting them. I remember dyeing eggs as a young child, then supervising the dyeing when my younger sister and brother came along.
One year, when I was in high school and taking Russian, my Russian teacher told the class how to make the beautiful Russian eggs—pastel colors with a pattern painted in wax on them, then dipped in black dye to cover everything but the pattern. So I tried this at home. But mine did not look like the pictures in magazines—I must not have put on enough wax to make the pattern clear, and my black dye was only a muddy purple-gray. Russian Easter eggs did not become a family tradition—one attempt was enough.
About a decade went by when I did not participate in egg-dyeing, from the time I left home at age seventeen until my late twenties when I had a child to dye them with. As a mother, however, participating in egg-dyeing was not nearly as much fun as when I was a kid. Now I had to worry about not coloring furniture and clothes and making sure that the kids did not drink the vinegar/water/dye mix. And that everyone received an equal measure of cracked and uncracked eggs to color. And lastly, that all the eggs found their way to the refrigerator, so they wouldn’t spoil.
Some years we dyed the eggs at home and transported them to my in-laws. Some years my kids dyed with Grandma, and I let her have the responsibility of managing the process.
But we had to dye eggs each year—otherwise, what would the kids search for in the backyard?
What memories do you have of dyeing Easter eggs? Did you dye them this year?
