Easter circa 1970

When I was a child, Easter was one of my favorite holidays! As I mentioned a couple of days ago, we didn’t have many specific food traditions, but we had lots of other traditions. About a week before Easter we would have to clean the entire main floor of the house and beg like crazy before Mom would let us get out the decorations. That was the first part of the adventure every year. 

Our house was a big old two-story with 10-foot ceilings. Mom kept the Easter decorations in a tiny cupboard at the top of her clothes closet. It required a chair that Mom would stand on and then the child who was selected for hazardous duty was hefted on her shoulders and up into this tiny hole in the wall. The cupboard was about three feet high and probably about five feet square. (It’s hard to remember exactly because I only remember being in it one time and I was pretty small then.) I have a tendency to claustrophobia, so I always moved to the back of the line. 

Each child had an Easter basket up there with grass already installed. My oldest sister’s was huge! The others were scaled down from there. We thought that was pretty unfair, but the Easter Bunny always carefully counted out each jellybean so we all got the same even if the baskets were different sizes. The other decorations I remember fondly were a couple of homemade bunnies Mom fashioned out of bleach bottles. She had cut a hole in the "belly" and you could see green Easter grass and eggs inside. Maybe once they were actually somebody’s Easter baskets, I’m not sure, but we thought they were incredibly cool. 

Mail in Kit from 1974 other vintage Easter crafts here.

When everything was decorated and our eggs were dyed we would set out our Easter baskets. That bunny always hid all the eggs and left us some candy in return. There was always a marshmallow peep or two, jellybeans and a few chocolate eggs. We would often eat all of our candy within a couple of hours so breakfast was usually unnecessary. 

After church (we didn’t have a block schedule then) we would pick up Grandma and Grandpa and drive up into the west hills. It was the only time I remember going west rather than east. The mountains to the east were much steeper with lakes and campgrounds. The west hills were low and gentle with just enough hills to make Easter egg rolling fun. We would park the car and get out and walk until the terrain was steep enough to roll the eggs down the trails. Then we would chase them as they bounced from rut to rut until they were ready to peel. 

We only had hard-boiled eggs at home on Easter, but Grandma and Grandpa had them all the time. Grandpa was a master egg peeler. He could pull it off in pretty much one piece. You know how eggs sometimes come off with the peel? Well, Grandma was a child of the Depression and when that happened and we wasted part of the white we were in big trouble for the rest of the day. 

After egg rolling we would hurry back to go to Sacrament Meeting and then have supper with the family. I love holidays, then and now. (According to Teach), holidays are special times that focus on family...and like the hokey pokey, "that’s what it’s all about!"