In grade school we used to paint hardboiled eggs. But who could we give them to? What kid ate hardboiled eggs? We might as well have painted prunes.
And I never got the point of an Easter Egg hunt. When I was a disc jockey at WDRQ in Detroit we had an Easter Egg hunt at a big local park and there were five stabbings.
What Easter meant to me was candy – the good and the bad.
The bad candy was the chocolate bunnies. Sometimes solid but most of the time these too were marshmallows coated in chocolate. Except it wasn’t chocolate. It was wax. Even at six years-old I thought they were disgusting.
My guess is there are enough preservatives in Easter candy to last until the next century. After all, starting tomorrow all stores carrying Easter candy will sweep it out and get ready for Halloween. What happens to all those leftover Peeps and bunnies? Are they just going to be thrown out? What do you think?
I suspect they go back to the warehouse and wait until next year. Or the year after. Or the year after that.
But for those of you who do celebrate Easter, have a wonderful day. Stay out of Detroit parks, set your alarm for 4:00 AM, use the chocolate bunny as a hood ornament, and save me a Peep.
At least your delicious peeps (oxymoron?)
ReplyDeletewill be 75% off at Rite Aid on Monday 4/2.
I don't know about Easter candy, but when I worked for a big wholesale bakery my supervisor swore that our Christmas fruitcakes didn't peak until at least their 3rd year of being put out on the shelf.
ReplyDeleteAt least we brought them in every January--the milkmen were famous for just hiding the egg nog ice cream at the very bottom of the freezer case for 10 months.
Ok, but what's your position on Pesach? Don't you feel liberated this time of year? Do you get rid of all the chametz in your house?
ReplyDeleteTwo full holidays in this part of the world (Good Friday and Easter Monday), i.e. all stores are closed from Saturday evening until Tuesday morning.
No, they get sold at a discount, just like the Halloween candy. 50% off, sometimes 90% off, and even the useless stuff sells fast.
ReplyDeleteI grew up where Peeps are made, and the extended Born family was one of the rather small proportion of Jewish families besides my own. Here's an interesting news story concerning the situation there, which I hadn't heard about:
ReplyDeletewww.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/03/29/feature/trouble-in-candy-land-how-peeps-pensions-and-a-lawsuit-threaten-to-upend-the-american-retirement-system/?utm_term=.ee6adb75f977
(Yes, channeling Cliff Claven here...)
ReplyDeleteEaster always begins the Sunday following the first full moon of the Spring equinox: seems that usually occurs somewhere in April, every now and again in late March. Depends on how far in advance the Sun and Moon plan their social calendar.
Don't remember the last time Easter fell upon April 1st. Curious as to how many woke up this morning, casually listening to radio/television, groggily thinking this some kind of mild April Fools joke - then realizing the making of any last minute restaurant lunch/dinner reservations would be certainly (at the least) interesting.
And you thought forgetting Valentine's Day made for an awkward social situation. Which it does.
I'm 180 degrees from you on candy- chocolat, si, peeps, non!
ReplyDeleteEaster can occur as early as March 22, which it last did in 1818 and won't again until 2285 (though it fell on March 23 in 2008), and as late as April 25; it did in 1943, and will again in 2038. (It fell on April 24 in 2011.)
ReplyDeleteEaster last fell on April 1 in 1956, and will do again in 2029.
Easter bunnies? Slightly more appetising than gefilte fish.
ReplyDeleteYou're eating them the wrong way. Try biting the ears off, one by one, and chuckling at the rest of the bunny: "You'll never guess what I'm going to do next!"
Which is, of course, to throw the revolting thing into the trash can. I've never met a bunny yet who makes the correct guess.
My husband buys us a 4oz Dove dark chocolate solid bunny. Even with our kids out of the house and grown, we still do the ritual auricle-ectomy, followed by the butt-removal.
ReplyDeleteWe had Easter baskets with fake grass and candy -- chocolate eggs wrapped in foil and filled with white stuff (crème if you guessed right, marshmallow if you didn't), and jelly beans. The empty baskets were stored in the cellar where nobody could find them, so every year we bought more baskets. Eventually there were enough baskets to open a basket boutique. They have no other known use. I don't know about Peeps. Maybe a West Coast thing.
ReplyDeleteAs bad as the waxy hollow rabbits are, try eating a solid one. Or just ask my dentist.
I'm not proselytizing, but if you're anti-religion or anti-Christian
ReplyDeleteYOU SHOULD SKIP THIS POSTING.
When I was a kid, I used to do all the Easter stuff. Having to get dressed up to go to church, dying eggs, Easter egg hunts, various candies and yes, even the dredded chocolate bunnies. (But I've NEVER had a Peep in my life.) Then as I got older I learned that these symbols have little to do with actual Christianity. Most of them are pagan (Babylonian) fertility symbols adopted by the early church. Even the word "Easter" is a variation if Ishtar, not the movie, but the pagan god. (Both however, are evil.) What Easter means to me was foreshadowed by Passover. That if you're covered by the blood of the lamb death will pass over you. It also means that "love they neighbor as thyself" is not just some platitude that you parrot at Christmas and Easter. Its the way we should all live our lives every day. I'm also pissed off at how the hypocritical Christians make the rest of us look bad. They open us up to scorn and ridicule from the atheists, socialists and the majority of those left-of-center. Remember, Yeshua didn't condem the sinners. He condemned the hypocrits. But, most of all the resurrection of Jesus {Yeshua} the Christ means that there's still hope for the world and human kind. Without hope and faith, what's the point?!
M.B.
>>I suspect they go back to the warehouse and wait until next year. Or the year after. Or the year after that.>>
ReplyDeleteAlso raising suspicions: what happens to all the unsold jars of Kosher for Passover Gefilte Fish? Come back next March and a lot of very dusty products will be back on the shelves of Shop Rite on the East Coast and Ralph's out west.
That production of JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR at the Universal Amphitheatre was mounted by the company I worked for at the time, Landmark Entertainment Group. I, too, attended but was an avid listener of the original Broadway soundtrack so I was very familiar. I felt most privileged to witness the performance of Carl Anderson as Judas in person...a spectacular talent who died in 2004. I thought tonight's NBC concert was excellent although too chopped up by commercials, maybe necessary in some instances for set changes. Say what you will about Andrew Lloyd Webber, he was the Lin-Manuel Miranda of his time, although my least favorite musical of his is PHANTOM OF THE OPERA...it has no middle. The only time I ate a peeps, it made me shiver from the sugar...not a good feeling.
ReplyDeleteMy experience has been that chocolate bunnies get worse and worse every year, not from age, but from increasingly terrible recipes. I almost WISH we could get unsold inventory from the '50s instead of the trash they're putting in stores today.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a fan of marshmallows, so peeps never had an appeal for me. They usually showed up in the basket, but we all knew to save them out until slightly stale and let mom have them.
ReplyDeleteNo, Ken, you probably weren't an Easter loving kid, since it's a Christian holiday. Supposed to be the true main holiday, memorializing the resurrection of Christ. Spring = rebirth, right? So that's why all the pastel symbols of spring, even the eggs. I have no idea where the Easter bunny fall in with that theme. We have over time made a bigger deal of Christmas, and the birth of Christ is certainly something to celebrate. But it was his death and resurrection that is at the heart of Christianity. Without those, he was just a nice guy and a decent prophet.
But I still don't care of pastel died marshmallows. Give me a big peanut butter filled chocolate egg.
I never had a peep going up. Still haven't.
ReplyDelete@Mike:
ReplyDelete"Even the word "Easter" is a variation if Ishtar, not the movie, but the pagan god."
No it isn't. And I'll thank you not to call the deities of other people "evil." If they don't fit in your theogeny, they can hardly fit on your personal scale of good versus evil, can they? What with not actually existing, and all.
But if you're going to make an attempt to fit them into your personal theogeny, then by all means, have at it -- with a little bit of, you know, analysis and looking things up and stuff. Not just blurting out second hand rubbish from some other person whose credentials you take for granted.
(And no, I am not a follower of Ishtar. I'm a Christian. And you might want to look up "Passover," which is of considerably more relevance than a Mesopotamian Goddess.)
I'm guessing that peeps now would taste the same as when you last had them, since they were probably manufactured at the same time.
ReplyDeleteI can confirm what MikeN said. There are four days a year when I buy candy: the day after Valentine's Day, the day after Easter, the day after Halloween and the day after Christmas.
ReplyDeleteYou don't like hard boiled eggs? More for me, then...
ReplyDeleteHave you noticed that all the dental holidays (Halloween, Christmas, VAlentine's Day and Easter) happen in cool weather? Well, of course they do, so the candy won't melt.
ReplyDelete