Easters Past

Easter has always been a memorable time in my life. The hope and joy of Christ's resurrection is most celebrated on this day although we should all think and remember these things throughout the year.

Easter is also, like Christmas, a time for children. I have many memories of the Easters of my childhood. Some warm my heart, some bring back a somewhat nauseous feeling and some lead into follow-up stories.

I remember an Easter in Roanoke, Virginia when the local radio station put on a gigantic Easter egg hunt. They advertised with fliers and on the air for weeks. A helicopter was to fly over the large park in town and drop thousands of the small plastic eggs for children to collect. Inside the eggs was candy or a slip of paper with a prize. I believe the big prizes were bicycles. Now, if you stop to think about this at all, it is not the best idea in the world. Picture hundreds of children standing looking up into the sky and then seeing a rain or more appropriately a hail of eggs falling. Did anyone consider the physics of it all, you know gravity, acceleration, the force the eggs would hit the ground or the heads of kids with? I don't know how many bumps on the head there were or how many eggs remained intact but it was chaos. My dad had taken me but we stayed at the edge of the mess and of course by the time we could get to where the eggs fell there were none. Such disappointment. But looking back....at least I didn't get bonked on the head. Wasn't there an episode of WKRP where they did something similar with turkeys or pigs?

We often had Easter sunrise services in Roanoke. The usual site was on top of Mill Mountain and while it was often cold, and very much too early, the sunrise over the western Virginia mountains was and still is very beautiful. That Easter as most Easters we had a ham for lunch after church. The ham had the scores on the outside making the little square block pattern. The parental units decided to stick whole cloves into the outside and while this was probably done without any directions, they went with the premise "If a few are good, more is better." There was not an empty square on the entire ham. The ham was placed in the oven to cook and off we went to the sunrise service and on to church. When we got home and opened the door, the odor of clove permeated the entire house and you can imagine how significant the flavor of clove infiltrated the ham. All I can remember about that Easter is the smell....I about threw up. The ham was not edible; I don't remember what we ate or if we could eat. The smell in the house took days to get rid of with all the windows open. To this day the smell of clove makes me sick.