Easter just isn’t understood in my house. Oh, as a religious season? A time of rebirth? Sure, but not the other meaning of Easter: Eating enough candy to rot out real teeth, porcelain teeth … shoot, even the teeth on your chain saw.
That it is a time for copious amounts of sugar in the form of marshmallow animals, chocolate bunnies, malted milk eggs and an assortment of candies that seem hatched straight from some mad scientist’s lab. “Hey, how about a chocolate egg with a creamy filling that’s actually like yoke? Just disgusting enough to be delicious!”
And the grocery store is awash in it. Bags of it. All kinds of shapes and sizes. If you want a life-sized chocolate elephant with a jelly bean center, they’ve got it.
But you know who doesn’t have it? The only house in American lacking a dump truck full of sweet garbage goodness: Mine. How is this possible? I have an 11-year-old.
Only, my daughter and wife aren’t big on the whole Easter candy trip. They’re more “traditionalists,” which means their candy tastes are boring. They’re likely to keep their real teeth all their lives. What kind of lessons are we teaching our daughter?!?
As a kid, I ate all kinds of stuff I didn’t like. In fact, stuff I despised. For instance, anything marshmallow. Always drenched in some food dye that tasted like cough medicine or bug spray, then crudely shaped into a bunny or an egg or a terrifying alien chick. Marshmallow critters are the fruit cake of Easter — required eating, even though no one in civilization actually likes them. Probably the result of some governmental brainwashing experiment that went bad, but never got canceled.
I also remember getting hunks of solid chocolate that were shaped like animals, but so dense that the only way to break off a piece was using a meat cleaver to hack away like a deranged serial killer. Nothing says spirit of the season like a boy wildly chopping a chocolate bunny while screaming, “Why won’t your head come off, stupid rabbit?!?”
Anything malted was also ok in my book. To this day, I still don’t know what “malt” is. It could be the same ingredients as moth balls, but cover it in milk chocolate or a candy shell and it was delicious. Every once in a while, I would get my favorite: a center that had turned chewy like caramel. Probably meant it was 17 years old and carcinogenic, but I loved ‘em.
None of these things fly in my house, though. My crew like Dove chocolates or peanut butter cups or candy you can get any time of the year. That isn’t Easter! It won’t leave a taste in your mouth until July. It won’t add an extra fat roll to your belly while you’re standing there. And it sure won’t check off any boxes in a government brainwashing experiment.
So, if you have any leftover malt chocolate eggs, save them for me … especially if they’re 17 years old.