Easter Tradition At The Dunnevants

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday. Kaitlin will be driving up from Winston late this afternoon. Patrick flies in late tonight. We will all be together, just the four of us for the first time since the new furniture arrived. Patrick's room is now where the movie room used to be and vice-versa. Hope he's fine with the new arrangement. Our new kitchen table's inaugural meal with all four of us will be the much anticipated Easter morning breakfast. This meal is famous in Dunnevant family lore because of Pam's "empty tomb rolls". She flattens out a tube of canned biscuits, then inserts a marshmallow and wraps the flattened dough around it to form a ball. This dough ball then gets dipped in butter and rolled through a bowl of some sort of heavenly ambrosia containing sugar and cinnamon. Everything gets loaded into muffin tins and thrown in the oven. Then these babies are served up on a plate with bacon, scrambled eggs and fresh fruit. When you dig in to the rolls, the inside is hollow since the marshmallow has melted, adding its thousand calories to the mix. The empty tomb rolls make us think of our Saviors' resurrection from the dead. It's all quite wonderful.

This year will be like all Easters in my family. There will be an egg hunt...with a twist. My two kids have always been insanely competitive with each other. Everything had better come out "equal" in the end or both of them will claim that the other is guilty of a "big braggy show". So, twenty years ago it became evident that just hiding a random number of eggs around the house and letting them go at it was problematic. This always resulted in one of them having more eggs than the other, an intolerable outcome for my strangely communistic children who always insisted, like Stalin and Mao before them, in equality of results!! To insure peace, Pam came up with the brilliant idea of buying an identical number of color-coded plastic eggs, giving each of them an identically sized bucket and letting them get after it, knowing that as long as neither of them were color-blind, they would end up with the same number of eggs, and we could go to church on speaking terms. This plan worked so well, we've done it the same way ever since, even though my "children" are both in their early twenties, college graduates, and surely beyond such pettiness. Somewhere down the line I came up with the idea of saving my pocket change all year, and instead of filling the eggs with teeth-rotting candy, filling them with quarters, nickels and dimes. This proved to be a raging success as well, although making sure that the money came out equal in the end was and is a labor-intensive process.

The question now has become, at what point do we retire the Easter egg hunt? Last year Jon was with us and I thought perhaps that would have been a good time to bring the festivities to a close. But, Pam, being the creative party-planner, people pleaser that she is, came up with the idea of buying a bag of plastic baseballs to hide for Jon so he wouldn't feel left out. I was fine with it, but drew the line at filling his baseballs with my change. Seriously though, one of my kids is in graduate school, and the other will be this fall, and we're still hiding twenty year old plastic eggs around the house for them to find? Yes, we do. Knowing their Mother as I do, we will be hiding those eggs for them every year until it comes to the point where our grandchildren start getting annoyed at having to share my change with their parents.