Easter Eggs

As my girls get older so their Easter egg pile gets smaller. People love to give children presents and take whatever opportunity offering itself to do so. But as the children get older this urge lessens. This means that when the child is 5 or so they can receive up to 15 or 20 eggs, now my girls can actually eat them all themselves,with sadly no help from me needed, they are lucky to get 3 or 4. This is not any kind of protest or gratefulness, just an observation, you understand.

My preference is for cream eggs, the cloying gooeyness is delicious, but I am a little embarrassed to admit when younger I did wonder if the centre was from a real egg and treated in some way to sweeten them. My parents used to give my girls Easter eggs from Italy where they live, huge ones with colourful wrapping like the one you see on the right. They can be up to 4 feet tall!

We used to have to smash them up with a hammer to fit them into our suitcases to bring them back if we'd been to visit during the Easter holidays. Perhaps it would have been more sensible to have had the little baby eggs shown to the left.

In Germany eggs are used as decoration. Every house has a little vignette outside by their front door, often a small twiggy tree with coloured plastic eggs dangling from it's little branches. They do brighten things up, especially when driving past seeing everyone's attractive entrance. They are also used to decorate much larger trees and every town has, in it's main square, an ornament of some kind absolutely groaning with these eggs. They must take days to assemble but are very pretty so worth while to do.

This year I'll be giving my girls and The Chauffeur just some ordinary ones of the kind found in every supermarket, thin hollow chocolate balls with a few related chocolate items alongside - gone are the days when you needed to break open the eggs to see what delights were inside waiting to be gobbled up.

Eggs used to be used as a way to use up the eggs just before lent then gradually people started to decorate them, colour them and give them as gifts. This slowly evolved into the extravagant exchange of the chocolate ones we have today, together with all the traditions small and large. One of the most fun traditions is the hiding of the eggs - the Easter egg hunt. We will be having one around the house rather than outdoors in the long grass or fields as many other people will be doing, and will use clues to find them.

There is actually much to say on the giving, receiving and traditions of eggs at Easter but as this blog is not about Easter, just the eggs found in the shops at the moment and the quantity and quality received I will stop here. Possible next year I will give a more respectful discussion of it, this year was just a bit of fun chat.