Ah, yes. Easter is around the corner. Easter, Easter, Easter, Easter! To me, Easter represents the Yin to Halloween’s Yang. I am not about to get into a religous debate with anyone over Easter. That is left for people with bigger brains than mine. Heavens to Betsy, no. I’m talking about the candy, sucka! Granted, candy manufacturers will sell their products to celebrate any holiday or event. What is it? Arbor day? Have a candy tree!

Easter is special because, like Halloween, all the really messed up candies start to emerge. I remember when Peeps used to be strictly for Easter. Now they have Peeps all year round. Oh, how I wish I could ride around in the Peeps bus! Who thinks of these things? Let’s see…we’ve got marshmallow which is almost 100% sugar. What can we top it with? Oh, I know! Colored sugar! What is really disturbing now is that there is actually the recipe and crafts portion of the Peeps website. When I had first visited the Peeps site the arts and crafts were a little kitschy. You know, like a hat made out of peeps. Now…well, yeesh.

Angela has this thing for the chocolate rabbits – the ones which are all brown except for their rabid, yellow eyes. I tell you, they are almost demonic. Cute little chocolate bunny. Tasty little chocolate bunny! OMG! CHOCOLATE BUNNY OF THE DAMNED! LOOK AT THOSE FREAKY YELLOW EYES STARING AT ME! The way she eats the hollow chocolate bunny is almost like torture for the fellow. She’ll open the box and pull out the crazy eyed candy and maybe take a little bite from it. Then she’ll put it in a zip lock bag and stuff it in the freezer. Does this sound a little Jeffrey Dahmer-ish to you? Eventually she’ll take it out and then crush it and beat it so that the poor googly eyed thing is nothing but little brown pieces…with freaky ass eyes that stare at you.

I could go on and on. I used to love Cadbury Creme Eggs. And then they came out with the Cadbury Caramel Eggs. And then came the onslaught of immitators, the worst of which was the Snickers Egg. This was pretty much a Snickers bar shaped into an egg. Here’s a little anecdote:

When I was in the 6th grade my class got to take huge bags of candy to hide for the rest of the kids in the elementary school. These bags contained licorice whips, hard candies, mints, gum, etc. It was like an Easter egg hunt for the younger kids at the school. Well, 6th graders were going all over the yard hiding their candies. In our increasing levels of laziness my friends and I looked in one of our bags and found that the last thing that needed to be hidden were a few boxes of Cadbury Creme Eggs. We took the first two Creme Eggs and hid them. When we realized that we would have to do it 2 dozen more times we took the easy route. I turned to my friend Chuck and looked at him with a really lazy grin.

“Do you think these things are sturdy?” I asked Chuck.

“I dunno. Sure. Why?”

And that was when I proceded to start throwing them. Chuck caught the fever, too. Yeah! This wouldn’t take any time at all! We didn’t just gently toss them, either. We would throw them like we were outfielders on a baseball team trying to make the throw to home plate. The sky was violated with Cadbury Creme Eggs sailing through the air. Another one! And another one! You go, Chuck! Yeah! Let’s throw this last one really far! For Justice!!

Content with the good deed we had done, we got our Lil’ Hugs (predecessor to the juice box today – it was a barrel shaped container filled with crappy juice) and sat on a bench and waited for the younger kids to be released to hunt for candy.  Yeah. Great times.  Little kids would come back to their teachers crying while holding the remnants of a Creme Egg which had been completely obliterated upon landing and somewhat gooey from sitting in the warm, Spring sun. Chuck and I got detention for that.

Ah, well. Jelly beans. I loves me some jelly beans! I remember winning a giant Easter basket at a local People’s Drug store when I was a kid. That thing rocked. It had a really big rabbit inside it, too. His name was Skippy. There was also a plastic bank in the shape of a little rabbit coming out of an Easter egg.  I named it Clyde.  After the candy and the fake green grass were gone, I lugged Skippy and Clyde with me everywhere. Good times indeed.