Easter is just around the corner
I’ve already begun thinking about Easter. Easter 2024 is coming a bit earlier this year; it is Sunday, March 31. No doubt your family has their favorite Easter traditions, things that you do and enjoy every year.
As the years go by and family dynamics change, sometimes those Easter traditions also change. For example, when my child and my sibling’s children were young, we would gather at Mother and Daddy’s house sometime in the afternoon on Easter Sunday and have an Easter Egg Hunt.
I always enjoyed hunting eggs as a child, and even if I do say so myself, I was pretty good at finding eggs.
But I had a child that did not follow in my footsteps in many ways. Being good at finding Easter eggs is one of those ways. Don’t get me wrong, Jennifer always wanted to go to the Easter Egg Hunt, and she always wanted to be involved in looking for those brightly colored eggs hidden in the clumps of grass or underneath a leaf…but she did much better if I was there walking by her side pointing out places she might look and find an egg. That should not have been a big surprise to me as she was never very good at finding anything, even if it was basically in plain sight. She gets that from…well…not me.
With all of the grandchildren grown up and moved away, or with children and even grandchildren of their own, we no longer have an Egg Hunt on Easter Sunday.
Another constant when Jennifer was growing up was a Wilborn Egg Hunt. The Wilborn Egg Hunt was usually as big as a community Egg Hunt because all of the Wilborns would turn out for it. It was always held at the home of Ricky’s Uncle Roy Wilborn. We would enjoy a big dinner with all the fixings. Uncle Roy would literally pass the hat. He would take a cap and go around to the men of the families, taking up a donation for the prize egg. So, finding the prize egg could be very lucrative, depending on how much was collected on any given Easter. As I remember it, there was usually $50 – $75 collected. Let me tell you, it wasn’t just the children that were out there scouring the yard for eggs. There were as many adults hunting that elusive prize egg as there were children.
Something I always remember from my childhood is that we always got a new dress to wear on Easter Sunday. Ours was usually homemade, but then, just about all of our clothes were homemade. Also, when I was a child, the Easter Bunny had not come into existence; at least, we had never heard of him. But when I googled about when the Easter Bunny first began, to my surprise, this is what I found: According to some sources, the Easter Bunny first arrived in America in the 1700s with German immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania and transported their tradition of egg-laying hare. Their children made nests in which this creature could lay its colored eggs.
Last year, I began a new Easter tradition. I’m sure I’ve written at some time in the past about the Christmas cards I have been preparing and sending for the past 28 years. Last year, I sent out my first “Bonita Wilborn” Easter cards.
It was a card, like my Christmas cards, with a poem inspired by God that I wrote, printed from my computer, printed an appropriate graphic for the season, and mailed to a few friends and family. Last year’s edition had a limited number of recipients (only a dozen), but this year’s list will likely grow a bit. It might not grow to the number of people that receive my Christmas cards, not yet anyway, but I will likely increase the number this year.
