Easter is coming! How can I tell? By the amount of marshmallow Peeps and cellophane wrapped baskets in aisle 12 in Kroger. While perusing the pre-made, no-thought-goes-into-it baskets lining the shelves, one thing caught my eye and made me take a second look. It was a package of “Edible Grass.” I’m assuming this will replace the shredded plastic grass that lined the interior of my Easter Basket when I was a child. I was never interested in eating the plastic grass, but this was long before kids started eating plastic detergent pods. Was my generation smarter? Perhaps. Or maybe instead of eating alcoholethoxy sulfate, linear alkylbenzene sulfonate and propylene glycol, we just preferred to eat chocolate.

For non-Christians, Easter can be a confusing holiday. Most people think that Christmas is the biggest holiday in the Christian church, but it’s really Easter. Christianity is based on the resurrection of Jesus, not his birth. It’s difficult to understand how Jesus’ death and resurrection connects to bunnies, colored eggs and candy. In a nut shell (or egg shell, if you will), early Christians tried to convert the pagans by parlaying some pagan rituals into Christianity. Pagans celebrated spring as a time of renewal and rebirth. People would carry baskets of seedlings to The Germanic fertility goddess, Eostre, who in return, offered them her blessings. Renewal, rebirth and resurrection equals Jesus. Now, the resurrection isn’t the only miracle that occurs on Easter. There is also a miraculous increase in the amount of people who show up for services. Easter Sunday pews overflow with the “once a year visit to church is good enough for me” Christians. It’s their yearly sacrifice.

Speaking of sacrifices, building up to Easter is the season of Lent. Lent is when from, Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, Christians make sacrifices by giving up something they enjoy. Apparently, candy and chocolate are the most popular items to sacrifice and that is why on Easter morning baskets are filled with sweet treats. Okay. That’s all I’ve got. If you want any more information I suggest you either return to church or Google Easter traditions.

The Lenten sacrifice is tough. Growing up, my parents always made sure we made some type of sacrifice and they held us to it. Every year I tried to outsmart my dad and our conversations would go something like, “What are you giving up this year?” “I’m giving up smoking,” I would answer. “You’re eight. Try again.” “How about liver?” This conversation would take at least 10 minutes until I finally agreed to, once again, give up chocolate. One year I gave up watching Star Trek. I don’t know how Jesus felt about that, but I felt it was a truly unique Christian sacrifice. I did find a loophole, though. While my brother was sitting in front of the TV watching Star Trek, I was hiding in the bathroom eating a Hershey bar and listening to the show. Technically, since I wasn’t watching Star Trek I figured it still counted as a sacrifice. Obviously, the Hershey wrappers in the bathroom tipped off my parents and so the next year when I told them I was giving up Batman, they didn’t buy it. So, once again, I was off chocolate for 40 days.

Hopefully, now that I’ve explained a little bit about Lent and Easter and the connection to the baskets, my tirade about aisle 12 in Kroger will make more sense. Here is a photo of one of the “Easter Baskets” I saw.

As you can see, it is filled with Disney princess items, stickers, crayons and a princess book. Nary a Peep nor an egg can be found. There is another basket similar to this one filled with Hot Wheels, squirt guns and a small Nerf football. Neither a chocolate bunny nor a Cadbury Cream Filled egg will be unearthed beneath that wrapping. Now, unless Cinderella and Belle accompanied the women who went to Jesus’ tomb on the third day, I don’t really see how they warrant being included in an Easter basket. And, it gets worse.

Williams Sonoma is selling an Easter Basket for $150.  I can’t quite figure out where the cost comes from, but I know I can get apples a hell of a lot cheaper than that. When I was a child, I can categorically tell you that my basket was less than $150 and it never contained apples.

I found another Easter shortcut at Kroger that day; a cake pan in the shape of a bunny. In my family, my Uncle Frank was the bunny cake expert. His Easter bunny cakes were always perfect and couldn’t be duplicated. Alas, since Uncle Frank is no longer with us, the bunny cake tradition has been handed down to my cousins and me.

For those of you who follow Pinterest, this is what is expected to grace your Easter dessert table.

And here’s a cake one of my cousins made.

Even though this bunny cake appears to have a giant tarantula on it and it looks like its bleeding, none of us would ever cheat and use a pre-made mold! The same goes for store bought Easter baskets.

First of all, I had the same Easter basket for years. They weren’t throw-away, one-use only baskets. They were beautiful multi-colored baskets that my mom packed away and resurrected each year. Also, it was not unusual for her to find a few rock hard jelly beans from the previous Easter that had gotten trapped in the plastic grass. Growing up, I believed that the Easter Bunny somehow found his way into our house at night, filled our baskets with candy and then hid them. Since my father’s OCD made him lock all the doors and windows multiple times each night before going to bed, I never knew how that rabbit got in.  Another Easter miracle. On Easter morning, my brother and I would run around the house until we found our baskets. My parents weren’t very creative and by the time I was six I knew to either look behind the family room drapes or behind the living room sofa.

Over the years, my Easter basket didn’t change much. It always contained the hard boiled eggs we had colored the night before. A big milk chocolate rabbit and one white chocolate rabbit (that I hated, but my mom loved), a handful of foil wrapped chocolate eggs, some marshmallow peeps, jelly beans (I only ate the black ones) and a big, fluffy stuffed rabbit. No toys. No squirt guns. No princess coloring books. And, thankfully, no edible grass. Apparently, rebirth and renewal applies to everything except the plastic grass. Easter basket grass is meant to be shiny and colorful and live for hundreds of years in landfills where it belongs.