When I was a kid, Easter was more about buying new outfits for all the kids and women to wear to church than the overdone Christmas wannabe that it has become over the past few years.

Easter wasn't a religious holiday at my house when I was growing up, and although we might have had a special dinner, I don't remember any. There weren't any new clothes for us, either, but I remember kids at school talking about their new dresses and shoes, hats, purses, and gloves; even the poor kids.

We didn't have Easter baskets, no chocolate eggs, not even any candy. We did, however, dye real eggs and look at our sugar eggs with the little bunny scenes inside and then they went back in the cupboard until next year.

One of them looked eggsactly like this:



Coloring the Easter eggs was supervised by my dad. We set out coffee cups on the counter, one for each color, with a teaspoon of vinegar in each cup, and a spoon for each cup for the dipping. Every year we started out with a dozen hard boiled eggs, and when it seemed a waste to throw the pretty colors away, we ended up coloring all the uncooked eggs, too.

The cooked eggs were hidden around the yard and we found them, and that was our Easter. We never missed the candy part because we didn't know that's what other people were doing. We didn't miss the new clothes part because our family didn't go to church.