When I was a kid, my mom always did Easter baskets for us. I remember the green plastic grass. I remember a few jelly beans nestled in the bottoms of the baskets. I remember often receiving a white chocolate bunny, because my kind, thoughtful mother remembered that I didn’t like chocolate but still wanted me to have a bunny. (I have never liked white chocolate, either, but back then there weren’t all the options we have now. Plus, we didn’t have a Target or a Walmart in my hometown, and Amazon hadn’t yet been invented, so she was really limited to what she could buy in the grocery store. This makes it sound like I grew up one hundred years ago, doesn’t it?) The only other thing that I got reliably each Easter was a beautiful Easter dress.
Oh, how I loved those Easter dresses! They invariably came in soft pastels – frothy milkshake pink, pale robin’s egg blue, duckling fluff yellow. They were always twirly, and often had things like petticoats and lace. I felt SO fancy when I went to church with my family.
We don’t really DO Easter, these days. We don’t go to church (and I find myself growing fuzzy on the Easter Story details, which I should really brush up on). We do dye eggs, for Carla’s benefit, and we do buy candy. The Easter bunny still visits, which means we still hunt for eggs.
I think we have mainly stopped buying Carla Easter dresses – although I loved getting her fancy frocks when she was teeny. This year, she gets a Passover dress because we have been invited to a seder at a friend’s house.
And we do Easter baskets. With the green plastic grass. I don’t put jelly beans in the grass though – a) I really dislike jelly beans, which is immaterial but needs to be stated, b) they tend to get lost in the grass year over year, which I find gross. To me, the only thing less appealing than a jelly bean is a stale jelly bean that may be five years old.
We usually get Carla a chocolate bunny of some sort, and then a few other little candies. I don’t really like chocolate, but I DO like Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs, which are not only the best Easter candy, but are by far the best iteration of the peanut butter cup. There is something about the specific ratio of chocolate to peanut butter that I find irresistible.
I also like Sour Patch Kids, bunny-shape pleasant for the holiday but not necessary:
And this year I asked my husband to include some cinnamon bears if he could find them. (He is doing the candy shopping this year, bless his heart.)
My husband also likes Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs. And the confusingly named Reese’s Pieces Eggs, which are VERY DIFFERENT and also I hate them. I would put Reese’s Pieces of any kind right down there with black licorice and jelly beans and those weird styrofoamy circus peanut candies. But to each his own! We are still able to enjoy a happy marriage despite our opposite feelings on the subject.
He will also enjoy some Cadbury Mini Eggs in his basket.
For Carla, we also get an assortment of whatever candy she might like, which is ALL candy, honestly. But I also usually get her a few little things that aren’t candy. Often, I do socks or underpants, but we recently replenished both of those staples so I was able to focus on less practical and more FUN little gifties.
Some spring-y stick-on or clip-on earrings, like these darling bunnies:
Some books. She has been a huge fan of the Magic Bunny series, but she has all the books. So this year I ordered her the first of the Lucky Bunnies series. This appeals to me because bunnies are Easter-y. (I mean, secular Easter-y.)
I found this silly LEGO bunny in the dollar section at Target (although it was NOT a dollar):
Carla (and her father, honestly) are obsessed with these Extreme Dot-to-Dot books, so I ordered her another one:
This triceratops taco holder has nothing to do with Easter, secular or otherwise, but Carla is still really into dinosaurs (and tacos), and I think it will be a fun Easter basket filler:
I’m not putting it in an Easter basket, but I did order myself some sunless tanner (I know I read about it on someone’s blog – let me know if it was yours!). Sunless tanner is one of those things I am VERY attracted to, despite the fact that they rarely work as promised and almost always smell nauseatingly chemical-y. I will let you know how this one works out.
And I ordered myself an Easter dress as well. It fits well enough, but I’m not 100% sure I love it enough to keep it. The model in the photo seems pretty young, but I can’t tell if the dress reads more Mother of the Bride in person. In case you aren’t sure, that’s not the look I’m going for. I would prefer Stylish And Springy Without Trying Too Hard.
I also plan to buy myself some more irises this week. They are my all-time favorite flower, closely followed by tulips. I spotted some last week for $6 a bundle and paired them with a bunch of yellow tulips and the arrangement made me SO happy all week long.
