Easter has come and gone around the Halbach household.

I think Oliver wasn’t exactly clear on what Easter was, and we didn’t think to tell him until Easter-eve. This worked out well, because the kids didn’t really have time to get excited about it until the night before, which kept expectations low.

The Easter bunny hid some eggs in Evie and Ollie’s room, and Evie swears up and down she saw the Easter bunny in her room. She has a description, including coloration (white) and height (bigger than a regular bunny, smaller than an adult). They slept in relatively late, but when they found the eggs hiding in their room, a lot of shrieking ensued.

Ollie found a decent number of eggs, but we did have to limit Evie a little bit to slow her down. Both kids found their Easter baskets (Evie’s in the pressure canner, Ollie’s under his coat on the coat rack). They both got a puzzle, Evie got a book about fairies and some fairy paper dolls, and Ollie got a book and the Annie soundtrack.

The kids also had a good time dying eggs, and were disappointed that we didn’t do more eggs. However, we had to limit it to the number of eggs we could reasonably eat!

Most of the excitement happened at church. (That’s the first and last time I’ll ever type that phrase!)

We knew there was an Easter egg hunt at the end of church, but I was surprised to see the Easter bunny coming down the aisle. It seemed a little…secular. Pagan even. But that surprise was nothing compared to the surprise a lot of the kids experienced when the Easter bunny tripped on a kid and his head fell off in front of all the children (the bunny’s head, not the child’s). You couldn’t have set this up better: all of the kids crowding around, cheering, the poor kid being mashed into the floor by the giant falling bunny, the enormous head tumbling off, the horrified face of the grad student struggling to get the head back on as fast as possible as if the kids surrounding her could possibly not notice that inside the Easter bunny was a tiny black haired woman like some kind of perverse Russian stacking doll.

The egg hunt went very well. They wisely split the kids into young, middle, and old. This meant that Ollie was down with the ravening beasts in the basement, splitting lips in an effort to grasp one more egg, while Evie was traipsing sedately with the few other “medium sized” kids in the church. The hardest part for Evie was that they told us to wait until all the eggs were hidden before starting, and I held a hand on her shoulder, forcing her to wait until they said to start. She was literally THE ONLY KID who was forced to abide by the rules. So on one hand, I’m the meanest dad ever, but on the other hand, a dozen other kids and their parents will burn in eternal hellfire for blatantly ignoring the rules in a greedy attempt to get more candy in a church.

One final bit of strangeness. After they service, they served champagne. I mean, technically, Easter is a joyous occasion, so it kind of made a certain sort of sense. “We closed the big account!” is a good reason for champagne, so certainly “Someone came back from the dead!” should apply as well. But it still seemed a little strange to be standing by the alter and hearing champagne corks popping. It was greatly distracting to the parents, which is probably why they didn’t mind their kids ignoring the pleas of, “Just a second kids! The eggs aren’t all hidden yet!”

If you are going to have champagne at church though, spring for the good stuff next time. This stuff was to champagne what church wine is to actual wine. Let’s just say this is the kind of stuff you’d save for the end of a wedding in Cana, if you know what I mean. I’d be embarrassed to scrub the floor with it. It took 4 people to finish our little plastic cup full.

Getting snockered in church, fighting kids for chocolate candy, and a giant, headless Easter bunny. In other words, we celebrated Easter like the pagan holiday it was meant to be!