Why I love the Easter Bunny

Growing up, I truly believed a big rabbit left a basket full of chocolates beside my bed on Easter morning. I believed he'd even braved late Spring blizzards in Illinois to deliver me my basket. The pastel-colored, hard-boiled eggs gave the basket color, but I never actually ate them. Yuck. Why would I when there was chocolate in the basket?  I didn't love the Easter bunny so much, though, that I didn't enjoy eating chocolate replicas of him. (I always felt a if the Easter bunny was a him. Not sure why.) I always ate the chocolate ears first and then slowly nibbled my way down to the feet, pausing a moment at the tail before finishing off with a flourish and wishing I had another.

The Easter Bunny even reads books, a fact I didn't know until today, but then he comes only one day a year and he probably has a lot of free time. He doesn't have to supervise toy making all year like Santa. He might paint a few eggs, but that's about it. Unlike Valentines Day which is laden with emotional drama, or Christmas, which is expensive, or even birthdays which have high expectations, the Easter Bunny is simple. You don't have to be good all year, or someones sweetheart, or travel in a busy airport and sit with annoying family to deserve a chocolate egg. You just have to like chocolate or jelly beans or peeps. Sugar.  Easy.

I hope I never get this healthy, or old, that I would want fruit for Easter. A Easter basket should have chocolate spilling from the basket, all kinds, nestled in green fake grass stuff that you will find scattered around your house and yard all the way until July 4th. It lives forever that grass stuff. There should be no such thing as a low calorie Easter Basket.

 

I hope, too, that people stop buying real, live bunnies for children. Buy a stuffed one, along with a book, a much kinder way to treat the bunnies. Bunnies need a safe and sound place to live. They get big fast and like to chew and chew, and they soon go from being furry and adorable, to being, well, still furry and adorable, but rabbits. My friend in Colorado tried to keep a bunny in the house, and the bunny chewed his phone line and his carpet and his baseboards and that's just for starts. Oh and the rabbit kept trying to escape. Stopped being fun real quick. 

  My friend in California has bunnies and this is how she keeps them, in a large enclosure with other bunnies where they can't escape and can hop and chew and hop and  chew to their delight. And they can stay outside year round in balmy California, too!

So Happy Easter everyone and may you find plenty of chocolate and jelly beans and all that sugary stuff in your baskets this year, or at least get to nibble an ear off a rabbit or two.