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At seven on Easter morning, my dad rolls out of bed and pulls on a warm-up suit, sneaking out of his room and down to the kitchen. He shoves a piece of bread into the toaster and flips through yesterday’s newspaper while he waits for it to pop. Then, breakfast in hand, he walks onto the front porch and surveys the lawn, steeling himself for the task ahead.
Next to Christmas, Easter is the most revered holiday in the Hamilton household. Despite our Episcopalian upbringing, we’ve abandoned most of the Christian traditions. It’s been years since I’ve attended church or sung “Christ Our Lord Has Risen Today.” I don’t own a single fancy church hat or fascinator in robin’s-egg blue or crocus yellow. I’ve never broken Lent with Peeps, hollow chocolate bunnies, or Cadbury Cream Eggs.
Our holiday revolves around the hunt.
Over the course of two decades, my dad has turned hiding Easter eggs into an art form. He nests them within boxwoods and gutter spouts, lodges them behind shutters or in the mouth of a hose. He conceals them under flowerpots and in the knots of trees. Where gravity opposes his plans, he uses tape to secure eggs to branches or fence posts. Sometimes, he runs one up our flagpole. While classic chocolate eggs are his candy of choice, he’s experimented with other mediums: miniature Snickers and Milky Way bars in glossy wrappers and small, saw-toothed Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
When I come downstairs, Dad is standing in the front hallway with a tennis racket in hand, practicing his service motion. He’s already taken a few laps around the garden to make sure that squirrels or other foragers haven’t disturbed his handiwork. A glaze of early morning sunlight coats the lawn and fat bumblebees explore newly opened flowers. Here and there, gold foil flashes from within the cup of a yellow tulip; metallic purple and green shimmer in patches of lavender or low-lying grasses.
“The Easter Bunny has been here!” he says when he sees me. “I think he’s been especially clever this year.”
I pad into the kitchen and plunk down beside William, my thirty-two-year-old brother, who is slouched over the speckled granite island nursing his third cup of coffee. Assorted ceramic chickens peer at us from cupboard perches. Though both of us live within thirty minutes of home, William and I have taken up weekend residence in our childhood bedrooms. Erik, my twin, decided to spend Easter in South Carolina with his girlfriend’s family, a treason that we’re choosing to ignore.
Erik has never won the hunt. He is the Ferdinand the Bull of our family, loping through the garden, daydreaming about banjos and petite hipster women. All the same, he’s indispensible to me, like the long-shot electoral candidate who draws votes away from your opponent. Sometimes, our dad hides pity eggs in the tops of trees where only Erik, the tallest of the three children by half a foot, can reach. Erik’s absence this year hints at a disturbing reality — that after twenty-plus years, we may be approaching the twilight of our traditions. We’ve been living in the rose-tinted reality of premarital days. How long before significant others pry us away? How long can we continue to eat so much chocolate without concern for our waistlines or blood sugar?
Before the competition can begin, Dad goes over the ground rules. The driveway and backyard are out of bounds; no trampling flowerbeds; no mauling siblings; it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Our arena is a wide rectangle enclosed on three sides by a fence that mom erected to keep deer from eating her perennials. On the right, an ancient oak hovers protectively over the yard, casting spring shadows on the grass below. On the left, a red brick turret juts into the sky, the product of our neighbor’s medieval remodel.
This year, Dad has added a new layer to our competition. “A grand prize!” he announces with a wink. For the moment, he stays mum.
The real prize, of course, is a year’s worth of bragging rights. For Dad, it’s all about outwitting his children. Though the actual hiding of the eggs takes a few hours, the scheming starts much earlier. Several years ago, for my mother’s sixtieth birthday, dad composed a book of haiku poetry inspired by evening strolls through our garden. These daily walks serve a dual purpose: not only can he flex his poetic muscles; he can evaluate hiding places for the following year’s hunt.
When our mom says go, William and I scramble through the front door, shoving one another aside, trying to reach the most obvious hiding spots first: the narrow slots behind black shutters, the underside of a rocking chair. At some point, our family’s Easter egg hunt must have had the same air of garden-party civility that characterizes the annual White House event. In the hazy past, we were cherubic children in seersucker or pastel, toddling on chubby legs, clutching woven baskets full of glossy plastic grass, peaceably coexisting. Now, our tradition resembles The Hunger Games.
This morning, Dad placed several ratty hats around the yard, perched on top of boxwoods or resting casually on the grass. Under a scuffed Nationals cap, I find an envelope with a slip of red paper folded inside. “Beware the feint! You think there’s something here but there ain’t!” he has scribbled in his barely legible lawyer’s handwriting. Behind me, I can hear him chuckling. His shoulders waggle up and down, and he removes his visor to wipe tears from his eyes. “Read it out loud!” he yells, wanting everyone to benefit from the witticism. Mom, the event historian, turns toward me with her iPad and starts recording.
After the recitation, I turn my attention to the fence-line. When I come within a few feet of an egg, Dad begins to shout, “Hot, hot, hot!” like a quarterback before the snap. I take a few steps to the left, peering into a tangle of gold forsythia and searching for the telltale glint of a wrapper. “Cold, cold!” he intones in a quivering voice, drawing out the vowel sound like Jacob Marley.
Our neighbors return home from church just as I am wading through the shrubbery that separates our houses. The father, a bishop in the Church of Latter-Day Saints, waves at me as his blond progeny spill out of the family car. I smile weakly, trying to conceal my ex-boyfriend’s scrubs and a natty, oversized t-shirt. I often wonder what they think of our yearly tradition. This afternoon, will Mr. Guzman draw his youngest daughter onto his knee and explain why the adult Hamilton children participate in heathen rituals?
Within an hour, William and I are both losing momentum. We seem to have plateaued. “Are you ready for another clue?” Dad asks, waggling his eyebrows. Of course, our preparedness is irrelevant.
“Sure,” William sighs.
As though called upon to make a speech, Dad assumes a wide stance and brings his hands together thoughtfully. “Your day will be brighter if you think arborvitae.”
From across the lawn, my mother, a woman with an encyclopedic knowledge of plants, cracks up. Naturally, neither William nor I have any idea what an arborvitae looks like. When Dad’s back is turned, Mom points to a tall, tapering shrub by the front porch.
I like to joke that our Easter festivities are part of Dad’s strategy, an elaborate scheme to shame us into settling down and giving him grandkids. Continue the bloodline or suffer the sugary consequences well into middle age. But then, who am I kidding? This is, after all, the same man who still makes us wait at the top of the staircase on Christmas morning, who lovingly fills our stockings with dental floss and roll-on sunblock, who sequesters three couches — one per aging child — for gifts from Santa. In truth, we’re all complicit in this sliver of extended adolescence, clinging to the holiday dynamics that have defined us for three decades. Someday soon the shape of our family will change and, with it, the nature of our traditions.
When Dad is satisfied that we’ve recovered all the eggs, we head inside to tally the spoils. For the second year running, I’ve won.
“What’s the grand prize, Dad?” I ask, having forgotten about it until now.
He clasps me on the shoulder. “An outing with your father!” he says.
Victory has never been sweeter.
I love this so much. I’m at this very moment texting with my dad to plan a big Orthodox Easter dinner at my house for May 1, and honestly, it’s pretty sweet.
My Dad and I were planning our kulich baking this morning! (Also, late Pascha always means lots of discounted Easter chocolate!)
We’re making: apps (veggies, cheese and crackers), roasted potatoes, roasted leg of lamb, moussaka, lamb chops, spanokopita, dolmades, a couple different salads, diples, baklava, and galaktabouriko. That’s what’s planned, anyway. No question my stepmom will bring more desserts, there’ll be more appetizers.
Twelve people, tops, will be there. If there’s one thing we Greeks know how to do it’s feed an army. Or, you know, feed a dozen people enough for a normal army.
Kneading kulich is the world’s best manicure prep/workout. My mother claims that her yearly pummeling of the dough is why her hands are still incredibly soft and pale; she’s found the work much easier since she took up regular training for boxing. (I tried making kulich once; it was a disaster, and the back yard caught fire–for unrelated reasons, but just try calling 911 when your hands are covered with that dough.)
I’m really short so I always have to stand on a stool or toolbox to knead the dough…aaand I usually give up after a couple of minutes. But I love the sticky messiness of it all!
And YES to enough food to feed an army! We judt overload on any kind of meat, cheese, eggs and dessert. Last year I got scolded by my priest for bringing a salad, despite the entire package of goat cheese I put into it!
(I’m a relatively new Toastie (been lurking with dedication for the past couple of months) and VERY excited to find other Orthodox people on here too!)
(I should clarify that while I was raised Orthodox and still do family observations Julian-style, I’ve pretty much peaced on the church, for reasons.)
Oh yeah, no implications intended! I’m just used to most people drawing a complete blank when I mention being Orthodox and it’s nice not to have to explain all the context!
Oh, my dad and I are both atheist. 🙂
I’m in Chicago & there’s rarely Christmas or Easter candy/decor/etc left after the western holiday dates. We used to get tons of candy, toys, etc on clearance just in time to celebrate.
Aaaaahhhh!! Mom was raised Romanian Orthodox, so Pascha has alway been celebrated with the horde of cousins, church food, the sunrise service with it’s thrilling possibility of one’s hair in danger of catching fire AT ANY MOMENT from the candles behind you, etc.
(also did anyone else’s church have the fantastically alcoholic pascha which is what this congregation called the church bread soaked in wine, which is given out in cups and I regularly consumed as a young child?)
Orthodox Easter rules.
Oh, I liked this so much.
I’m trying to figure out what our family’s tradition will be, as this is my daughter’s second Easter, and the first she’s really mobile for. I hope our tradition ends up being as long-lasting and happy as yours is.
My parents always made a hunt with a trail of clues! One year I think all the clues were in different books. Then at the end there’d be a basket of chocolate. It was lovely. They’d stroll behind us and hint if we got stuck.
Can I be part of your family please?
This is adorable. Your family sounds like a joy.
This is so sweet <3
https://media.giphy.com/media/Qw4X3FGaZ6y9cLu1EwE…
This was magical, your father is a treasure, and Erik is a fool.
Seriously, Erik, what’s the DEAL, man??
How to Teach Your Kids Plant Names While Also Messing With Them This month’s Dad Magazine feature article!
Very sweet. I love families that continue family traditions into adulthood. My mom now sets out 5 stockings on Christmas morning–for me and my brother, and my husband and my baby.
Stockings is also our only tradition, but it’s been well covered.
I now have three christmas stockings lovingly needlepointed by my mother. My original one, my part of the themed set she completed for the late addition of my sister, and now one that matches my husband’s (which she also made). I think every extended-family child has ended up with one, and in a dry spell she offered to make one for my thesis advisor’s baby. (“it doesn’t have to be a stocking, you know! If you can find a way to ask if she celebrates Christmas or not I can do, like, a wall hanging…”)
This is so sweet, and reminded me of my dad hiding Easter eggs in our shoes, under pots, inside the cabs of Tonka trucks, in pockets of jackets…we’d be finding them for weeks afterward.
I am so excited for Easter! My family used to do multiple hunts every year. The first official one, then the kids would hide for the parents, then different combos of people until we all got hungry. My kid is 2 and I’m trying to decide if he’s old enough to learn to hide eggs. Probably, right? Sure. Definitely!
I have also been debating this. My wee one is almost two and a half, and crazy excited about Easter eggs and identifies them with great joy, but I am not sure about the hiding/finding concept?
My LO is 2 1/2 and loves hiding and finding things. He gets really excited and shows you where he’s hidden whatever it is, but he loves it. I’m definitely doing a hunt for him this weekend. We usually hide chocolate eggs but I’ve got some of those plastic eggs so I can put in raisins or gummy bears or whatever – a full hunt of chocolate eggs would be WAY too much. And we’ll get him to help hunt for other people’s eggs too (we always do separate hunts, with assigned rooms and exactly equal quantities of chocolate, because some people getting more chocolate than others would not work in my family!).
☺
I’m straight up envious.
As adults we hid eggs for my adopted youngest siblings and later, for my sister’s kids, but weren’t allowed this heathen indulgence when we were growing up. We need someone irrepressibly mad like this writer’s father to make it happen. I so love that they still indulge him into their thirties, and thereby indulge themselves, a little, in that extended adolescence.
My dad does this too! I think it was only when I hit about age 23 that I was permitted to help him hide them rather than participate in the egg hunt myself.
(He is super into clues and games in general. One time for my youngest brother’s birthday–I think maybe his 12th or so–he organized an elaborate scavenger hunt with maybe 10 or so rhymed clues that eventually led my brother to his gift. Being a Dad, though, he laid them out in an order such that one clue would send you up to the attic, the next would be down in the basement, the next would be outside, etc. It took forever, but it was GREAT.)
Ha! That’s exactly my strategy for the Pirate Treasure Hunt I set up for my nieces and nephews at our family’s summer gathering. Keep them busy as long as possible going up and down stairs and back and forth to all extremes of the house and yard! Then when they finally find the treasure box, they have to do foam pirate sword battle with a villain pirate to get the key.
I wish my dad were. It’d be super helpful as I’m currently without ideas for a crime-themed scavenger hunt I’m trying to sort out for a kid’s detective-themed eighth birthday party next month. I already told her I wasn’t willing to do anything that involved people dying or terrorism or the like–I don’t think death’s a game, and we’re in Paris, so it’s hard to say who may have been affected by real life events recently–but I’m not coming up with very good ideas for other potential crimes, either. Theft is sort of obvious, but maybe also the easiest. Her interests are a lot more fun than her younger sister’s but last weekend’s ballerina party was SO much easier to plan….
We had very intense egg hunts all the way through high school, but stopped when we were all far away from home during college. I think I won the final three egg hunts, and beat one of my sisters so badly that she refused to hunt for eggs the last year (or maybe she was just too cool to continue to participate…). The real winner, of course, was our dog, who would find hardboiled eggs that we’d missed buried in the leaves 6 months later.
I love the grand prize. Dawwwww! Our Easter tradition involves forgetting about Easter until the last minute & dying eggs Easter Sunday bc we forgot to boil them earlier. I don’t think my 7 yo has ever taken part in an Easter egg hunt.
This was absolutely charming and delightful!
And oh, the shifting of holiday traditions – you think you’re longing for something different, for a shake up of The Way We Always Do It…then it happens and it just feels so strange! My family had a big shift in how we do holidays years ago when my brother got married, and then again when his kids were born – but it’s been status quo now for a good 15 years. This last Xmas was the first time plans shifted because of ME and I felt hugely, and surprisingly, guilty about it (even though nobody seemed to mind).
We had our Easter egg hunt a few weeks ago, because I happened to be home visiting and so did my sister with her progeny. (My brother, a senior in high school, is the major proponent of making sure the hunt happens, even if it’s just with him.) After a few years of finding eggs in August or October, we have a rule that whoever’s hiding counts how many eggs were hidden so we know if we missed any. Our hunt doesn’t sound as magical as yours, though!
Also we happen to be LDS so I don’t think Mr. Guzman will have to explain what an Easter egg hunt is to any of his children.
I was raised LDS and we were all about the egg hunts. Although we did get in a little trouble one year at Grandma’s when we were hiding real hard-boiled eggs and, like, *apparently* it’s a bad idea to hide them under the sofa cushions where people are going to sit. So for awhile we were only allowed to hide them in the yard and not in the house. (In our family the kids took turns hiding eggs for each other.)
Reading this makes me feel like Calvin O’Keefe meeting Meg Murray’s family in A Wrinkle in Time.
Can I be a Hamilton? Meg/Kathryn, do you know how lucky you are?
My family never really did easter egg hunts or baskets. Basically, just the candy. No preamble.
CHRISTMAS however. My dad told my sister and I that Santa wasn’t real when we were like 3. However, my family sorts all the gifts. At first, it was by recipient. Then giver (at relative’s houses). Then by size. Now, we number the gifts. Each number corresponds with a name, and the number must be drawn at random out of the bag. Then that gift can be opened.
We’ve also moved from leftovers and chinese food to Chinese food, frozen h’orderves and beer/wine slushies.
We’re an organized and classy bunch.
<3 Dads.
This is so wonderful, thank you for sharing this with us all.
A few years ago, I was hanging out in a local park on Easter and reading, and watched a mom and dad shepherd their just-barely-walking daughter through an Easter egg hunt with only two eggs. As soon as she found an egg, she gave it to her parents and her mom would help her find the next egg while her dad hid the egg she’d just discovered. They went through an entire park like this with just the two eggs, and she was HUGELY entertained. I was impressed at their Conservation of Easter Eggs.
brb gotta go have another baby so I can do this with it. My current baby is too old and jaded.
This is wonderful. I enjoyed it so much.
We continued all our childhood traditions well into adulthood. After my brother died suddenly, things ground to a halt. This reminded me so much of my family when he was still here, and it is very bittersweet, but it’s always good to be reminded of what was so good about growing up in my family. Thanks for that,
Please submit a photo of your dad for the cover of the next issue of Dad magazine. PLEASE???
I loved everything about this. Is “I think he’s been especially clever this year!” part of the Dad Collective Unconscious? Because that’s definitely what my dad says every single year. Our hunts are not as elaborate, but we do indeed continue to hunt for eggs every year.
I really want to arrange an egg hunt for my adult friends now.
I love this so much. My mom just visited and left an Easter basket for us, with STRICT instructions not to open before Sunday. <3
Your family is similar to mine re: dads, stockings and egg hunts. Unfortunately as me and my siblings live a bit too far afield to consistently come home for Easter, the egg hunt has stopped. But back in the day each child had a specific plastic egg color to find that were hidden at different age appropriate levels of difficulties. Whoever found all their eggs first won!
Thank you. This dose of family sweetness was sorely needed today.
Your dad is a fantastic dad, A+ heart-warmingness
Forgery? Tracking down international art thieves? Something about counterfeit money?
…clearly I need an excuse for a crime themed scavenger hunt of my own.
Love this. My dad’s favourite holiday is also Easter. He loves hiding the eggs, though we do it so each person has a set allotment of eggs and their own room. We all watch each of us (my three siblings are all over 35, and we hide for my dad, too) hunt and cheer on the really well hidden eggs. There’s always one or two we miss and turn up at Christmas. So fun. My son is two and a half and I can’t wait for him to do his first hunt at grandpa’s.
Oh, I loved this, especially this bit: “after twenty-plus years, we may be approaching the twilight of our traditions. We’ve been living in the rose-tinted reality of premarital days,” and this one: “In truth, we’re all complicit in this sliver of extended adolescence, clinging to the holiday dynamics that have defined us for three decades. Someday soon the shape of our family will change and, with it, the nature of our traditions.”
I love love love my fiance, my brothers-in-law, my niece and nephew. But also I cried this Christmas because I miss the years when Christmas and Easter were just weekend-long slumber parties with my sisters. There are things that are better now (my nephew dying Easter eggs with us, this week; that is our big Easter event), but also just different.
I could write this article but the sad, dysfunctional version. Like actual adults fighting over scoring minutiae to the point of near violence. Even after grandchildren arrived, my siblings would participate in the hunt, knocking over toddlers in their eagerness to win my father’s approval, which of course was and is never forthcoming.
Eventually, I banded together with my one sane sister-in-law and we insisted on an adult-free Easter egg hunt. Some of the diehards try to transfer the competitive insanity onto their children, but mostly things are better. TL/DR, don’t play board games with my family.
I have to confess that I did not click on this until Nicole explained it in Toast Points. Mallory’s “X made horrific” posts have conditioned me so that when I saw the single line “Our holiday revolves around the hunt,” I expected this post would ruin Easter for my by turning it into something like Lord of the Flies.
Instead, what a delightful piece!
Huh, so it wasn’t just me.
After reading the title and the tagline I was a little disappointed that this wasn’t some dark dystopian Easter fanfiction.
My parents always made a hunt with a trail of clues! One year I think all the clues were in different books. Then at the end there'd be a basket of chocolate. It was lovely. They'd stroll behind us and hint if we got stuck.