Easter eggs have been on the shop shelves since the Christmas trimmings were packed away, such is the pace of life these days.

When I was a child, Easter was an occasion we looked forward to, and planned for, much in the same way as we did other annual festivals. Nowadays, the year seems to go by in a blur with no discernable ‘seasons’ or high points, which I think is a shame. 

On a recently unseasonably warm day, I looked out of the window and was surprised to see a small rabbit in the garden, munching on long strands of grass amid the daffodils. I could hear lambs bleating in a nearby field, and watched the birds as they began finding materials to build their nests. Signs of new life everywhere reminded me of the Easters of yesteryear, and what made them so special. 

I’ve always loved animals. Baby rabbits, ducklings, lambs – you name it, I’ve saved it at some point in my childhood, either from the neighbours’ cats, or after finding them abandoned.

I’d like to say I wasn’t interested in the chocolate Easter eggs we had as kids, but that would be fibbing. It was the only time of the year, apart from Christmas or birthdays, when we were given chocolate, and carte blanche to eat it at unconventional times.

My sister, for example would polish off at least one or two Easter eggs before breakfast.

She would often feel slightly queasy for all of a few minutes and then make a miraculous recovery so she could resume the choc-fest mid-morning. 

We usually got Easter eggs from a couple of aunties along with one from our parents.

One year, my piano teacher gave me a chocolate parrot. It was in a transparent plastic ‘cage’ and not remotely ‘Eastery’, but such was my love of animals, I couldn’t bring myself to eat it! I didn’t like eating chocolate chicks or bunnies either – I felt sorry for them.

Anyway, goodness knows how my sister resisted the urge to snatch the parrot while I was asleep, or how it escaped the jaws of my friend who eyed it up every time she came to play.

But somehow it survived on my dressing table for several years before my mum told me it must be mouldy and needed to be disposed of.

In the 1970s, Easter eggs always had some treat hidden inside, such as a bag of Smarties or Jelly Tots, or if we had a posh egg, a few chocolates like those you’d get in a box.

Even if it was plain old Cadbury’s or Nestlé, the chocolate on an Easter egg always tasted so much more special than a bar, especially if you got a particularly thick piece of shell.

I recently asked mum if she remembered the Easters of her youth. As with most things during the 1940s, Easter gifts were few and far between.

Mum, now 87, said: “We used to go to church with my mum, and my friend Mary came with us as her mum didn’t go to church – I think she preferred the cinema!

Us children were then invited up to the rectory to hunt for Easter eggs in the garden. We didn’t have very much at all but it was a tradition with my mum dating back to her childhood that we got new things to wear for Easter. I distinctly remember getting a yellow dress with spots on it that someone had made for me.” 

As a creative child in the 1970s, I enjoyed the weeks leading up to Easter when we would make related crafts at school. I recall creating pompom chicks, where we would wind yellow wool around two cardboard circles – one large, one small – and then stitch the two pompoms together to create a head and body.

We then added little felt feet, wings, beak and eyes. Of course, I had to go a step further and make a cardboard chicken coup to house my chick, complete with straw bedding so it would be comfy!

One Easter craft lesson that didn’t go quite as smoothly was when the vicar – who was rather more fond of partaking of the communion wine than administering it – came in to teach us how to make painted ‘blown’ eggs. The idea was to carefully remove the contents of the egg through small holes created in both ends of the shell, so we were left with an empty shell to decorate. 

As you can imagine, a class full of seven-year-olds with several dozen eggs and a tipsy vicar was a recipe for a lot of mess, much merriment but very little in the way of Easter gifts at the end. 

The same vicar once got us to make the ‘hand of Jesus’ using old rubber gloves and copious amounts of plaster of Paris. Given that the gloves mostly had holes in them, you can imagine the mess that resulted. 

When we were in our twenties, my sister took my young nephew to buy me an Easter present. He was insistent that ‘Aunty Emmee would prefer a furry rabbit’ than a chocolate egg, much to his mum’s amusement. But he was spot on, and I have treasured my bunny for the past 30 years.

Did you make Easter gifts or do you have recollections of Easter egg hunts from your youth? Write to me with your recollections and pictures at ebrennanhere@gmail.com
Emma Brennan is an award-winning journalist and former newspaper editor with a fondness for yesteryear.