Commentary by Christy Solo
As The Great Egg Hunt Weekend approaches and I look forward to (and back on) photos of our wee area tykes running across perfectly manicured lawns snatching up brightly colored plastic eggs and I am reminded that the egg hunts of my childhood were very much…not that.
I fully support our area hunts; I ran more than a few of this type back when I was in Corporate World and in charge of the Office Easter Event. However, “hunt” is doing a lot of heavy lifting at these snatch n grabs.
The egg hunts of my youth were held at my Grandma Helen’s house (as was every holiday event, she was the Queen of Parties and you didn’t dare hold an event anywhere else).
Her house had at least an acre of fenced backyard, probably closer to two. Within that fenced area were two epic lawns (so glad I was too young to mow!), a pool, a patio, trees, hedges, a swing set in a huge sand filled play area, a side yard, a corporation yard and a chicken coop. Oh! and a strip of “wild growth” between the big lawn and the creek.
Not one square inch of that yard was “out of bounds” for hiding eggs. The egg hunters were me and two neighborhood girls. Probably also my brother for a few years until he aged out. We were the only grandkids at that point.
The egg hiders were my dad, his two brothers and later on my brother.
They were not hiding the eggs for us three little girls to find per se. For them it was a years long competition of who could hide eggs in the most devious of places. Somewhere there’s a photo of my mom lifting me up so I can get an egg out of a tree. A tree y’all – I was four!
And yes, there was always that post-hunt egg scramble (see what I did there?) for the few eggs which had been hidden with such evil intent they could not be found. These were chicken eggs, and Grandma Helen would make the boys hunt, well for as long as it took. She would not put up with eggs rotting away around her manicured yard.
By the time I was 11 my uncles added a new level to the hunt. They added two or three plastic eggs with swag and these were hidden with deep malice.
We’re talking good swag too, especially for an 11-year-old. One year they hid a silver dollar (that’s like one million in Kid Money) in a blue plastic egg at the bottom of the pool. Another year it was a tiny gold nugget in an equally tiny plastic egg they’d spray painted gold and hidden inside the handle of the pool net. That one took hours to find. We finally had to go to the old “You’re getting hotter! No you’re cold! No you’re freezing!” game to end the hunt before dark.
Those eggs, from the prettily painted chicken ones to the deviously hidden plastic ones, were not easy pickin’s – but clearly those childhood egg hunts were memorable ones!
