Rural Routes – An egg obsession
Posted on April 2, 2015 by Maple CreekBy Christalee Froese
It started with a dozen, or was it two dozen?
Add one more dozen, and that makes two (or maybe three)!
I had a dozen and a half in the fridge, or was it three dozen?
It doesn’t really matter. My point is that I’m obsessed with eggs at this time of the year. And that’s only because society seems to be encouraging me to colour them.
Colouring Easter eggs is my passion and now that I have a four-year-old accomplice in the form of my daughter, I can safely colour as many eggs as ‘my daughter darn well wants.’
I believe we’re on egg 46, or is it 64! And we haven’t even hosted our annual egg-colouring party yet.
I have the fondest memories of colouring eggs right up until I was actually far too old to do so. I don’t know exactly where the egg-dying cutoff is, but I’m thinking somewhere around the age of 14 or 15 one should start to lose interest in this ‘juvenile’ craft.
Not I.
I found ways to indulge my ‘egg-dying’ addiction well passed the age of 15. It was a little trick called, ‘inviting the neighbour kids over to colour eggs.’ The three adorable Fisher girls were my unsuspecting accomplices, as they’d annually answer the call to come over to dye vats full of farm-fresh eggs. I have some incriminating photos that put me well into my 18th or 19th year, and still, there I was colouring eggs with pony-tailed children as if I was one of them.
As I grew older, it became socially unacceptable to colour Easter eggs rather than have a life. So I stopped. But boy, when I had a child, he was dying eggs before he could say, ‘oh no, egg crack.’
I have incriminating photos of these days as well. They feature a diapered baby with an egg in his hand (OK, he wasn’t quite old enough to hold the egg, but it’s in someone’s hand) and it is in beautiful shades of purple, green and pink (as are my baby’s hands, face and Pamper).
As I grew older, the need to dye did not disappear. So on a whim one day, I called up the Fisher girls. By this time, they were adults as well. Low and behold, they agreed to come over and we dyed eggs like it we were 8, 10, 12 and 19. The smell of vinegar transported us back in time.
With my 17-year-old son now entering that ‘grey’ area where egg dying may not be so cool and with my four-year-old only being able to focus for 10 minutes at a time, I have now moved into the ‘egg-dying-party phase’.
I find that if I throw a party, people will eagerly indulge in egg dying as if they too were kids.
This year our egg-dying party will be particularly historic as we have moved into the third generation of egg dyers. Not only are the Fisher girls coming over to dye eggs, but so are their children!
It started with a dozen, but now I think I’m up to about 10 or 20 dozen. A dozen for me, a dozen for my daughter, a dozen for each of the three Fisher girls, a dozen for each of their spouses and a dozen for each of their children. Yup, that makes an even 20 dozen. Some dreams do come true.
If you have nothing to do the week after Easter, please come for egg salad sandwiches – I’ll be making about 20 dozen of them.
Email Christalee Froese at Lcfroese@sasktel.net or visit 21days2joy.wordpress.com.
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