When I was very young my brother and I colored a few hard-boiled eggs for Easter. Sometime in the night the Easter Bunny hid our eggs plus many more around the living room. Of course, the ones the bunny brought were prettier than ours, but little ones barely notice that. On Easter morning my brother and I were sent into the living-room to hunt for the brightly colored eggs while my parents watched and kept count of our finds. We always had dogs and cats in the house. After the bunny hid the eggs, the cats determined they were put there for them to bat around. The dogs watched and decided the eggs were for eating. With all the eating and batting my parents had trouble keeping an accurate account of the eggs that were found.

Once the eggs had been gathered, my mother put them together and headed to the kitchen to devil them or add them to her potato salad. My brother and I were fine with that because, once the hunt was over, we were more interested in the candy and toys in the baskets than hard-boiled eggs--no matter how pretty the eggs were.

All went along as planned until the year my mother found an egg the dogs or cats had re-hidden. She found it by following the awful odor she smelled. She immediately decided there was to be a discussion with the Easter Bunny about the next year’s hunt. The bunny argued, “but you can’t have Easter without an egg hunt!” My mom agreed but was not going to follow her nose to a rotten egg again. Finally a compromise was found; the bunny would hide jelly beans.

The next year my brother and I still colored a few eggs, but they remained in our baskets. However, we were thrilled when we were ushered into the living room and spied jelly beans all around us. In the early years the candy was lined up on table edges and chair arms so they were easy to find. As years went by, the bunny became more inventive with the hiding places. The back wall of our living-room was made entirely of rock with a very large fireplace in the middle. It was possible to balance a jelly bean on the face of a rock or in the mortar. Some were on the top of lamp shades or the top of draw pulls. A full line of beans could hide “in plain sight” on top of a short book in the bookcase. As we aged you could hear shouts of, “You’re warm, warmer, no cold,” a game of “hot, cold” was started by my parents.

When I was in school, I was baffled as to why nobody in my class hunted jelly beans; they hunted colored eggs. By the time plastic eggs were invented and there was no reason to avoid hiding eggs, our jelly bean hunt had become such a tradition we never gave it up. My daughter, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren have hunted jelly beans on Easter Sunday.