Mention Easter season traditions and some people always think of chocolate bunnies or jelly beans. For me, the excitement of decorating, painting or dyeing Easter eggs as a little kid is always the memory that I think of first.
I was in the grocery store the other day, and I looked at an egg-dyeing kit; I don't think they've changed one iota in 50 years. Each kit still contains: six tablets of color dye (red, blue, purple, orange, yellow and green); a wire egg holder that must be bent to properly dip the eggs; and a sheet of paper stickers that you immediately throw away. I suppose, though, that the price has tripled...
"Mom, when can we make Easter eggs?" I remember begging at about the time the first chocolate bunnies hit the store shelves each year.
"Not yet!" she'd say sternly. "Good heavens, Easter is still a month away."
Eventually, time would inevitably pass, and my continuous nagging would get more and more insistent. The aforementioned egg-dyeing kit would then come home with that week's groceries. Two dozen eggs would be put on to hardboil in the large stainless-steel pot that was originally purchased to sterilize baby bottles. The kitchen table would be covered with an old plastic tablecloth, too.
Ron, my little brother, and I would be buttoned into our "official" Easter egg-dyeing smocks (actually, they were just old white shirts of my father's that we'd put on backwards and roll up the sleeves), and-along with the warning of, "Be careful, this egg dye doesn't just wash out!"-the dye would be prepared.
Six cups, one for each color, were set in the center of the table. A tablespoon of vinegar was poured into each cup, and then the color tablet would be dropped in to fizz and dissolve. When that happened, the cup was then filled with water and the dye would be ready.
While all this was happening, the eggs would be boiling away in their bubbling cauldron. When they were done, they'd be taken out of the water-filled pot and set on the kitchen counter to cool. Finally, the eggs were dried and moved to the table, ready for their date with destiny.
"I want the purple first!" Ron insisted.
"Fine, go ahead," I submitted, "there are five other colors, and all the cups will get used eventually." After there were two eggs dyed each color, the inspired creativity set in.
"I'm gonna do one half blue and half orange," Ron announced.
"OK, you can do that," Mom agreed, then suggested, "Why don't you do one half blue and then half yellow, but overlap each color a little and you'll see that when you mix those two colors, you'll get a green band in the middle."
This became an opportunity to teach the color wheel. That day, as we dyed Easter eggs, we eventually learned that the red and blue mixed together are purple, and that combining red and yellow makes orange. Then we'd dye an egg yellow and then draw a design on it with a wax crayon and re-dye it with the blue; the egg would end up green except for the yellow areas we'd covered with wax. We also found out that year that a lot of colors mixed together end up brown.
A few years later, after we'd progressed in egg decoration beyond a simple solid blue egg, a solid red egg or a simple solid purple egg, Mom showed us how to blow eggs and then we'd be able to keep our handiwork for year after year. If we were careful.
"Take a pin," she advised, "and then carefully chip out a little hole in one end of a raw egg. Next, turn it around and do the same thing on the other end. Then you stick your toothpick through one of the holes and break the yolk. Finally, over a dish to catch the raw egg, gently blow into one of the holes and the mixed raw egg will come out the other, leaving you with just the whole, hollow, eggshell.
"You can then paint the shell with watercolors or thinned poster paint," she continued, "and keep it around for as long as you want."
"What do you do with all the slimy egg stuff?" Ron asked.
"I don't care," Mom offered, "make French toast..."
Have a happy Easter, and remember-if you're eating a chocolate bunny and you eat the ears first, it won't have any calories.
Gary McDaniel, a Magnolia resident, is a freelance column for the Magnolia News and Queen Anne News, an associate publication. He can be reached at mageditor@nwlink.com.[[In-content Ad]]
