Easter Eggs

Easter was huge in my family. As we were regularly reminded, it was to Catholics a more important religious holiday than Christmas, which was agreed to be a pleasant enough season but strictly for amateurs; Easter was the big guns, the marking of Christ’s crucifixion on Good Friday – a tale told to Catholic children in gruesome detail from the youngest of ages and which, astonishingly, appears to have produced not a single nightmare in a single one of us – and his subsequent miraculous rising from the dead on Easter Sunday, a feast marked with hymns of joy, cries of celebration, and, reputedly, in households more organized than ours, new clothes to wear to Mass.

For us children, however, the grand liturgical feast of Easter meant one thing and one thing only. It meant Easter eggs.

Photo by Owen Bjørnstad

Easter eggs in Britain were not like those in America, which, to my admittedly still somewhat sketchy understanding, are regular eggs, hard boiled and with their shells dyed bright colors, delivered in baskets by a merry and magical creature called the Easter Bunny, who – inexplicably, but then this is Easter after all – may also have laid them. In Britain, you only got one Easter egg instead of a basketful, but it made up for it by being several times the size of a chicken’s egg and, far more interestingly, made of chocolate. A huge, glorious shell of the stuff, standing a foot high and more, cocoa-brown, milky sweet, and melting on the tongue, which when you broke the shell open, revealed – and, oh, the never-failing thrill of the discovery – yet more chocolates inside.

British Easter eggs weren’t delivered by a magical bunny or by anyone but ordinary old parents, but for the Donnelly children, they could have been dropped off by the Grim Reaper for all we cared. By the time Easter arrived we had been white-knuckling its approach by having been denied any sweets whatsoever for the entire season of Lent. Well, the entire season except for Sundays. And St. Patrick’s Day on March 17. And my birthday in late March. And my brother Mark’s birthday in early April if Easter came late. And if my mother, Mary Josephine, were in a celebratory mood, she’d sometimes throw in St. Joseph’s Day, too, on March 19. But for most days of Lent there had been – discounting, of course, the mastication sounds of the small mountain of sugary cakes and biscuits that were wolfed down daily in the Donnelly house – not a rustle of a sweet wrapper to be heard. The deprivation had been brutal.

First thing on Easter morning all five of us – yes, even my slothful self who my parents were known to complain had elevated oversleeping into an Olympic event – rose bright and early in order to get to the 9 o’clock Mass and be home in good time for the more pressing matter of the day. The eggs came in large and lavishly decorated cardboard boxes, delicately colored in festive shades of daffodil yellows and apple greens, illustrated lovingly with all manner of swooping birds and blooming spring flowers and sometimes tied with a ribbon, the containers themselves a feast for the eye of any person with an ounce of artistic taste. We were not such people: within seconds the birds and flowers and pretty spring colors would lie ripped to shreds on the ground and we would be about the task of consuming the boxes’ contents.

The trick was to pull apart the two halves of the egg, break off a pointed piece of one half, and use it to write our name on the inside of the other. This was regarded as the height of sophistication and the cutting edge of technology: our family didn’t, as they would say now, get out much. Once one half of the egg had been consumed and the other suitably trademarked, we would turn our attention to the chocolates inside. There was a lively trade in bartering for these. Orange creams were highest in cachet, for a reason that now eludes me and no one then thought to question. Strawberry creams were also popular, as were caramels. There was a gluey confection that nobody much liked that was grandly called Montelimar, any of whose resemblance to French nougat was purely coincidental. Even less popular with everyone but me were the jawbreakingly hard toffee chocolates called cracknell which I alone found quite delicious, an opinion I guarded jealously close to my chest during the mainstream bargaining, only afterwards, when all the popular sweets had been equitably distributed and the rejected cracknells lay abandoned on the table, to scoop them up unnoticed for my own little private after-party of one. As the sole sister, I figured there had to be some payback for Match of the Day.

One Easter afternoon, I went to a friend’s birthday party, leaving behind me an egg which, for reasons I cannot now begin to guess, I had not yet opened.

“Can I have that while you’re gone?” said one of my brothers, who shall remain nameless.

“No, you can’t,” I said. I was a soft touch, and we both knew that once I’d opened it I’d share it; but there were, after all, lines to be drawn. “It’s mine, not yours.”

“But that’s not fair,” he said. “You’ll be having birthday cake for tea, and we’ll just have boring bread and butter and bourbon biscuits.”

“But she’s my friend, not yours,” I said. “And it’s my egg, too.” And off I skipped in my sparkly strapped shoes to the party.

And a fine party it was. We played Pass the Parcel, and Musical Chairs, and Pin The Tail On The Donkey, and there was indeed birthday cake for tea, along with an array of other delectables. But all the while there was a niggling worry in the back of my mind. That particular brother, now a radiantly upright and law-abiding citizen, was at the time, let us say nebulous on the concept of mine versus thine, and I was by no means certain, as I munched my tea with furrowed brow of concern, that when I returned home my spare Easter egg would still be waiting for me. Could it be that the large chocolate cupcake I was currently consuming in preface to the even larger chocolate éclair that would follow, would be the last piece of chocolate that I would taste that day?

At last, my father arrived to pick me up.

“Did you have fun?” he said as we began to bowl home in the family car.

“I did,” I confirmed.

“Good,” he said. Then smiled fondly: my father harbored for my brothers a level of affection that I found profoundly baffling. “Your brother’s missed you,” he added. “He’s been asking all afternoon when you’d be coming home.”

The worry in my brain dissolved: my egg was safe. There was only the one reason why my brother would yearn for my return to the family hearth; and it was not for my collection of Chalet School books.

My father glanced over to me. He saw me smiling, and nodded his head in quiet satisfaction at this touching display of sisterly attachment.