A Glorious Mess

The day before Good Friday, I watched some teenagers reacting to Easter eggs they’d been given as prizes. A few put their treat in their bag for later. One put hers in her jeans pocket. That’s all I’m willing to say about that one given it was a warm day. The rest peeled off the foil wrapping and ate the eggs. Within the eating, there was great variety. Some tapped the eggs on the table to crack them, others bit the top off to make it easier to eat the rest, and one fellow (because there is always one) shoved the whole thing in his mouth and chewed noisily and with great delight.

I was sitting between two teens, and, for the sake of conversation, I told them about when I was a child. My parents didn’t have much money, and chocolate eggs were expensive. We were grateful to receive one egg – anything more than that was in the realms of sheer heaven. I was in raptures of delight the year I was given an egg train with four small eggs in the packaging.

More often than not, I ate part of my egg before breakfast. Church on Easter Sunday was non-negotiable, so off we’d go with me already feeling sick from too much chocolate but still having to sit through the entire service. When my boys arrived, we made the rule that church came first (no sick sons for me!), and the eggs were given after that. I like to think I’m clever, but it did then raise the problem of trying to have easter egg hunts later in the day when the sun was doing its thing. For those of you who don’t know, Australian chocolate has an additive in it to help keep it firmer for longer in warm conditions. However, chocolate eggs still go soft very quickly under direct sunlight in late March or early April in Western Australia. As a result, we’ve held the hunt inside the house for a long time now.

My boys eat their eggs in much the same way as the majority of the teenagers I was with. They bite the top off and then consume the egg. If it’s a bunny, they go for the ears. I tell them the way that my sisters and I ate the eggs, and they think we were nuts. They don’t understand having to draw out the pleasure of a sole egg or a few small ones. I described our process of egg consumption to the kids sitting near me, and they also thought it very unusual.

First, I showed the kids that the eggs have a pattern on their outer surface that resembles crack lines. I’m not sure the teenagers ever noticed that, given the speed with which they put them in their mouths. I would put the edge of my fingernail into one of the lines and trace around its shape. It often took a few tracings to loosen the first piece, which would then get pushed into the egg. Because the eggs are hollow, having that small gap would make it easier to break off other fragments. Except, I wouldn’t break random bits off – I continued tracing around the lines and breaking off the next shape, and the next, and the next. Once you’d gotten the first bit out, the rest snapped off easily enough after a light tracing around with your nail because you could put pressure on the shell from the inside of the egg as well. Our pleasure came from seeing how long we could manage to break off the small pieces in whatever shape they were without breaking the rest of the egg. Whether it was because we were playing a game, challenging ourselves, or working with delayed gratification, the ‘how’ of eating the egg was as pleasurable as the taste of the chocolate. It also made our eggs last much longer, which was important when you only got one.

We do a similar process with Christmas and birthday presents. Because we have mostly been just our family of four, without extra relatives living nearby, we draw out the process of opening presents. First, we read any attached cards and acknowledge the giver of the gift to the rest of the people seated at the table. Then the present gets opened, and photos are taken to show to extended family as thanks for the gift. After the present is opened, if it’s Christmas, we play a game with the discarded wrapping paper. We scrunch it into balls and throw it at an allocated box or bag, set at a ‘reasonable’ distance from where we are sitting. Mostly we miss because we’re not the most coordinated family, but there is great cheering when someone scores a goal. The dual benefits of this game are that it draws out the present opening process, and means the wrapping paper is either already in a box for recycling or is near enough to it that it’s a quick process to drop it in the box. The extra win is that small items don’t accidentally get thrown out when clearing up wrapping paper that’s lying all over the floor.  

My question is whether my habits are the result of lack – having to make one egg last, finding a way to not have a celebration over quickly when there aren’t other people around to share it with – or are they great ways of making much of little? We (first my sisters and I, then my husband and myself) have found ways to make the process as enjoyable as the present.  I can’t see that as a bad thing, even if it does mean that I look weird when I eat an Easter egg!