Eastertime musings…
In our current circumstances, this might be a very expensive Easter bonnet!
But it is a safe bet that if we see any Easter bonnets today they’ll adorn the head of someone under 8 years or over 80. (I think they went the way of white gloves and black patent leather shoes!)
But candy? Chocolate candy? It won’t disappear. Remember the I Love Lucy episode…the speeding conveyor belt with Lucy and Ethel stuffing the fast moving chocolates anywhere and everywhere?
As a previous chocolate store owner, I say that chocolate beats all of the other Easter candy choices. And just to be sure I was not prejudiced, I checked out some statistics and found that 70% of Easter candy purchased is chocolate, with 90 million chocolate bunnies! (from the National Confectioner’s Association)
And how do you eat your Easter bunny?
Believe it or not, they had a survey about how they should be eaten:
78% of Americans said ears first, 11% said feet first, and 11% favored eating the tail first!
And what about those other Easter candies? Each Easter season, Americans buy more than 700 million Marshmallow Peeps, making them the most popular non-chocolate Easter candy. And jelly beans? We Americans consume 16 billion jellybeans at Easter. If all those Easter jellybeans were lined up end to end, they would circle the globe nearly three times.
In spite of this musing on this season’s chocolate eggs and bunnies, it is important to me to focus on embodying true meaning of this time of year.
Easter is a time of rebirth and renewal. The recurring cycles that are marked by the feasts and celebrations of the year have a real value that we acknowledge in our more contemplative moments. As these cycles come again and again, they teach us the same lessons from a new point of view.
Renewal and rebirth are the touchstones of spring. Let’s take this opportunity to remind ourselves to slow down, to breathe, to contemplate, to just be.
