Easter Eggs in My Bed

Easter Eggs in My Bed

As a small child learning about the Easter holiday, and the art of dying, hiding and hunting Easter eggs, I never dreamed I would one day be involved in an Easter egg war with my sister. Now, as an adult, with a child of my own, I find that I am still participating in the egg game we played so often.

This past fall, I spent Thanksgiving at my sister’s house and now I jump each time the phone rings and expect a cryptic message on my E-mail. It had been three days since I had left Jan’s house. Jan is my younger sister. I am waiting for her to scream and yell and complain. I am laughing to myself in anticipation of having won at least one more battle in our Egg War.

Jan lives in a far and distance, very small, out-of-the-way, wide spot in the road, called Playas, New Mexico. I live in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, just west of Albuquerque. The two towns are a six-hour drive apart, so we don’t get to see each other as often as we would like. Consequently our War of the Plastic Eggs had almost dwindled to a stop.

I have had a love/hate relationship with plastic Easter eggs most of my life. Actually Easter eggs of all kinds have been important to my family for at least the past four generations.

My granddad, a cowboy and World War 1 hero loved nothing better than hunting Easter eggs. Although he died a few months before I was born I remember the stories my mother and grandmother told of how Granddad would first boil, and then dye the eggs for Easter. They dyed them with coffee grounds, tea-leaves, onion skins, and various other homemade dyes. At some point they began using Paas Easter Egg Dye. An Easter with good weather was ideal (and still is) for a picnic and egg hunt, and Granddad always preferred to hunt eggs more than to hide them.

My parents made sure my sisters and I got to hunt our eggs several times over the course of an Easter Sunday. There was the initial hunt when we first got up. Then, after church, there would be several more hunts that afternoon. As I grew older, and being the oldest of three girls, I became the official ‘hider’ and my sisters, Sarah and Jan, the ‘hunters’. But how much can you do with two dozen boiled eggs, especially when they keep being eaten.

Then someone invented the plastic egg. I’m not sure when this was. I believe I was about nine or ten years old when we acquired our first ones. That would have been around thirty years ago. (I’m showing my age.)

Plastic eggs gave a new dimension to egg hunting. They didn’t have to be boiled or kept refrigerated. All kinds of things could be hid in them. Real eggs (boiled are preferred), small toys, candy, gum, pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, jewelry, (costume or expensive), watches, miniature collectibles, packets of flower seeds, love notes, or anything else an imaginative mind could dream up. That is, as long as the item you wanted to put into the plastic egg is smaller than the egg.

With the advent of these new-fangled, plastic, come-a-part eggs, my sisters carried the egg hunting business to new heights. As soon as the thought of Easter crossed their minds, the eggs were brought out so that they could ‘practice’ hunting eggs. Naturally it was my job to hide them. Of course it didn’t take long to realize that if the eggs were broke apart there were twice as many half-eggs to hide and hunt, as there had been whole eggs.

My sisters, Sarah and Janice were five and seven years younger than me. Hiding eggs seemed like an easy way to keep a little piece in the family. (If I didn’t, there was lots of screaming and yelling). Consequently, I was forced to become an expert ‘egg hider’. (Mom and Dad did help once in a while). I found every nook and cranny that an egg (or half an egg) would fit into, both in the house and outside.

If I was adept at hiding the eggs, my sisters were just as good at finding eggs and I had to continually devise new and unusual places. Places like under leaves, or hats, or newspapers, chair covers, or cooking pans. In bowls, flowerpots, forks in trees, folded towels, bushes, or even Dad’s shirt (while being warn), or with a sleeping dog. Even in the parakeet’s cage, or in the fish aquarium.

I learned it was best to count and make a note of how many eggs (or pieces of eggs) there were before hiding them so you knew when one wasn’t found. Sometimes even the hider will forget where all the eggs are, then you’re really in for a hunt. I remember one year when we hid a bunch of eggs outside, and we actually gave up finding one of them. My mom found the egg several months later while doing some yard work. This poor lost egg just happened to be a real egg, and boiled. No, it didn’t smell too good when found. (Yes, we have been known to dye and hide raw eggs. It has to be done with lots of care and I don’t advise it.)

The three of us did grow up in time, but we never lost our love of Easter eggs. So each year at Easter we continued Granddad’s tradition of the egg hunt. Usually it was only our close family, but there was an occasional grandparent, aunt, uncle, or cousin, friend, and even a few boyfriends.

When I was eighteen and had been away at school for several months, I decided to come home for Christmas break. After a long, tiring trip, and several hours of talking with my family, I called it a night and crawled into bed, only to feel several hard, round lumps in the bed. There were plastic eggs in my bed! (And it was Christmas vacation!). There were eggs between the sheets, and blankets, under the mattress pad, and in the pillowcase. The War had begun in earnest.

I believe Jan had the original idea but Sarah certainly helped, as did my mother. It was a never-ending war, and it seemed I was always on the loosing end. As many times as I retaliated, my sisters always seemed to be one up on me.

My husband, Lee, was initiated into our family with plastic eggs in our bed on our wedding night, when we choose to go to our newly, rented apartment, rather than a motel.

While Lee was in the Navy, I got to spend several months with him in Hawaii while he was stationed at Pearl Harbor. When his ship was sent to Taiwan, Vietnam and other places I couldn’t go, I flew back home to New Mexico. Never having a thought about eggs, I was again surprised to find several dozen plastic eggs in my bed on my first night back. I had lost another battle.

In the course of life Sarah’s job took her to another state, (maybe she wanted away from the Egg War), but Jan and I continued the battles. Maybe it was because we had children close together in age. Of course we had to teach our kids this unusual game, but somehow they never joined in to the extent Jan and I had. For a while the Egg War was almost at a standstill.

This year we decided to try and get as many of our family together as we could, at Jan’s home for Thanksgiving. It was two days before the holiday when I found a stash of plastic eggs in a closet.

It took some work, but on the day after Thanksgiving, just before I left her house, I managed to sneak into Jan’s bedroom and hide the eggs, and I must have done a super job. As I later found out it was my niece, Cindy, who found the first one when she sat down on her mom’s bed. Jan and Jim, my brother-in-law, had slept with the eggs for two nights without finding any. Score one good point for me. Of course a king size waterbed like they have is easier to hide eggs in than a regular bed.

No, I didn’t hide all the eggs in the bed. I wonder just how long it will take Jan to find the eggs in her dresser drawers, the closet, Jim’s boot, and other interesting places.

Will the Plastic Egg War continue? I hope so. Oh! No! I forgot Jan and family are coming to visit me over Easter. I think I had better lock my bedroom door.

Maybe you and your family would like to try something like out Egg War. I think it has helped my sisters and I be better friends, and it sure has been lots of fun.

The continuing saga of the Egg War.

      The first part of this story was written numerous years ago. Since then Jan and her family moved to Clatskanie, Oregon, and my husband, Lee, and I moved to a different home in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. Plus all of our children have left home. My son, Dustin, is living in Chaparral, New Mexico where he is a horse expert, and if it doesn’t concern horses it isn’t worth thinking about so he doesn’t think much of the Egg War. My nephew, Joe, is living in the Los Angeles, California area where he is trying to get into the movie business. I’ve no idea what he thinks of our Egg War. My niece, Cyndi, has just returned from about six months in Germany where she was going to college and has now returned to finish her education in journalism in Oregon. She is a big fan of the Egg War, and was the one who put the most recent batch of eggs in my bed when I visited.

My nephew, James, lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa with his wife and two small sons who love the game of hiding eggs as much as the rest of the family. In fact my sister, Jan, taught his wife, Aubri, all about the Egg War when I have a small family reunion at my home to celebrate James’ graduation from college a few years ago. Aubri was all far this strange idea of fun that her new family liked.

I recently went to Clatskanie, Oregon to visit Jan and Jim and help take care of Jan after she had surgery on her foot. I arrived there in the evening and after several hours of visiting I went to bed in Cyndi’s room, as she was off at college. Again I had forgot about the eggs. I found about 15 of those nasty blasted, plastic eggs in Cyndi’s bed, which my dear niece had been so kind as to place there before she had left.

The war was on again.

      But where could I hide eggs for someone that was to have surgery on her foot and be in a cast for the next six weeks or so? And confined to the downstairs area of her home? I certainly didn’t want to do anything that would cause her to have any kind of ‘hissy fit’ and injure herself if she found an egg in an unusual place. But I had a week to find the very best places to hide those precious and colorful, plastic eggs. I took my time finding nice, warm, sweet, little homey beds for all those eggs that Cyndi had left in her bed for me to find, as well as a few others.

Now time well tell just when those little wonderful treats will reveal themselves.