The northern prairie region is one of those special places where you can hide your Easter eggs in a snow bank, even when Easter falls towards the end of April. Maybe the idea of colouring Easter eggs came from a country with spring snowstorms, since brightly dyed eggs were easier to spot than white eggs on snowy Easter mornings.
To look out the window as I write this, you’d think it was December, not April. I’m confident that spring will come eventually. That’s the promise of Easter. Resurrection and rebirth.
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The weather is improving, so the snow may melt away soon, but there’s always a chance for another snow squall and another few centimetres of snow fall.
Easter eggs aren’t what they used to be in our house. I grew up with the hard-boiled eggs that we would dip in dye. I didn’t even mind eating them after they had completed their festive tour of duty. I wasn’t wild about the hard-boiled yolks when I was little, but I could eat a lot of hardboiled whites with a little salt and pepper.
I was always better at eating hardboiled eggs, Easter and otherwise, than Dad. He lost his taste for hardboiled
eggs after his cousin “preserved” a whole bucket of eggs by hard boiling them when they were chasing a group of horses 250 kilometres to auction in the 1930s. He claimed he ate enough hard-boiled eggs as they camped out on that trip to last a lifetime.
Dad would be happy with our transition from real dyed eggs to the plastic
eggs that pop apart and reveal a few jellybeans, a couple malted milk balls or a quarter for the piggy bank. The switch to plastic is probably a hardship for the farmers with laying hens, but a boon for the jellybean sellers and the always growing plastics industry.
It builds character in our children when they have to wear their winter coats to hunt for eggs on Easter and stretch their Halloween costumes over coveralls and snowmobile suits to go trick-or-treating. It doesn’t mean we don’t have some pretty nice weather after Halloween or before Easter but our sometimes uncertain weather will give us different holiday memories than kids from warmer climates.
Sometimes the cooler weather is a benefit. You don’t have to worry about the chocolate melting in your Easter basket or trick-or-treat bag.
And Easter is a welcome holiday.
It’s also a spiritual thing found in church for many of us, not a commercial thing at WalMart.
It takes a lot more than a little snow to dampen that spirit.
Ryan Taylor is a rancher, writer and senator in the state legislature from Towner, North Dakota.
