The importance of eggs

is not to be underestimated.

Last week I gave a friend of mine some egg cartons. I had been saving them for some time. I kept forgetting to give them to her and there were several waiting for her. 

As I passed them over she remarked, "We both eat rather a lot of eggs don't we?" 

This is true. She has hens so I am the occasional lucky recipient of a few very fresh eggs that come from well fed hens who roam her garden. That's even better.

But eggs have been on my mind for other reasons this past week. It is Easter Sunday and there are eggs everywhere. I am not doing an Easter egg hunt in the garden this year because half the children in the street are away for the weekend. The general feeling was that it was "not fair" if the absentees missed out. That's fine with me. It's been fun but it is a bit of work. I have showed two of the children around the corner how to dye their own eggs "like our yia-yia used to do". (Their grandmother was Greek-Cypriot.)  I only know how to do that because another Greek-Cypriot grandmother, Middle Cat's late MIL, showed me. P... was horrified to discover Middle Cat and I did not know how to do this. Those eggs were just plain hard boiled eggs dyed so as to have red shells. 

I have seen fancier eggs of course. There are always some in Handicrafts at the state's annual Show. The Stewards refuse to handle them. They look too delicate. The problem of handling and displaying them is left to the judges. There was always one by a friend who now sadly has dementia and has been taken by family "back home" to Europe.

And there were the Easter eggs of my childhood. There was the little egg-sized egg we were given at school. It was made from cheap chocolate covered in foil. We children ate those on the day we were given them. Then, in my family, we would be given two more. 

My maternal grandmother insisted on giving us eggs made from sugar-paste. "They last much longer," she would tell us. Really? They were supposed to last?  We dutifully thanked her each time. Mum would put them up in the cupboard "so you don't eat it all at once". She would break off bits and give them to us. We would take the pieces outside and bury them in the garden because, although we liked our fair share of sweet things, we did not care for those eggs.

My paternal grandparents gave us chocolate eggs. They were Cadbury chocolate eggs of course, probably all that was available at the time. They would also be broken into pieces and we would suck the pieces slowly to make them last. I can never remember chewing a piece of chocolate egg. It was something you simply did not do. 

Now eggs of the Easter variety seem to come in all sorts of varieties and sizes. I observed at least seven different sorts at the supermarket checkout. There were chocolate rabbits and chocolate bilbies too. I do not care for the idea of the latter. Chocolate bilbies are just politically correct nonsense and not nearly as popular as one or two people like to make them out to be. I looked at them and wondered, yet again, if I should find out what those "creme" eggs are all about but did not bother.

Yesterday I saw some beautifully dyed and decorated eggs. One of the Ukrainian refugees had made them. Today they will be given to people who have been good to her and her family.  Her neighbour N... showed me these as he photographed them so she could send pictures back to her more distant relatives in Kyiv. He isn't a religious man at all. He describes himself as a "devout atheist" but he said, "This is what Easter should be about."