Last year my husband Bill’s sister Pat was here from Florida for Easter. She was at our house on Holy Saturday night when it was time to get the goodies ready for the kids and the grandkids. She really wanted to help, but then she never had a chance to get Easter ready for a small army before.

The “Bunny Bags” were ready for the grandchildren—pink lunch sacks for the girls and blue ones for the boys—with bunny faces drawn on them, all 20 of them lined up by families, on the dining room table.

At the other end of the table stood the humongous family basket that we try to fill with all our kids’ favorite Easter candy. It probably holds 8 to 10 pounds of chocolate candy by the time it’s filled. Sounds like a lot, but it isn’t when it’s divided up among 15 or more people.

Filling the bags is really an easy job. We just open one of the bags of candy we’ve been buying over the last few weeks. I count three to five pieces in my hand and dump it in a bunny bag. Then on to the next one.

I was on the third large bag when I noticed Pat was still on her first one. She was putting the candy in one piece at a time and double checking to make sure she wasn’t cheating anybody. She did learn pretty quickly though. By the time everything was filled she was slinging candy like an old hand.

She dropped the last piece in the last sack, sat back, and said, “That was really fun. I’m glad I was here. Now, I’m ready for bed.”

“Go ahead if you want to, but we’re not done yet. We still have the plastic eggs to fill for the Easter egg hunt,” I explained.

“Okay,” she said with a sigh, “How many do we fill?”

“Two hundred,” I said, as I put the box of eggs between us and the coins to fill them in front of us.

Her eyebrows went way up, but she just grabbed an egg and started filling it.

I usually just put one coin in each egg. She was stuffing three or four coins in each egg. I told her to do it like she wanted to do the candy—one at a time. She agreed, but when the kids opened the eggs, some of them hit the jackpot.

Last year about this time our grandson Eddy died from cancer. Easter was always his favorite Holy Day so we decided a fitting memorial for him would be an Eddy Egg.

The Eddy Egg looks pretty much like the other eggs, but it’s really special inside.

Instead of a coin or candy, there is a slip of paper which entitles the finder to a special prize. Last year it was a flop eared ceramic bunny.

This year the children simply took it for granted there would be two memorial eggs, one for Eddy, and one for Uncle John who was killed in an accident in January. And so it was.

I’m sure Eddy and John are just as thrilled as the kids are with their memorial eggs.

And if there were tears in some of the adult eyes during the egg hunt no one seemed to notice.

I hope you have a holy and happy Easter!

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This column was first published in the Greenville Advocate April 2, 1997.