Peter Paas Easter Egg Dye is to eggs what chocolate chips are to cookies. When I was a girl, Mother and I used the dye tablets dissolved in vinegar, and Bill, Vicki and I dyed eggs and ornamented them with the little doodads from the kits.
Peter Paas has been around far longer than I. During the 1880s, a druggist in Newark concocted the dyes to sell to his customers for five cents a packet. They became so popular that he started the Paas Dye Co., taking the name for Easter from the Pennsylvania Dutch word “Passen.”
Today the company sells ten million packets a year and estimates that 180 million eggs are colored. The company says, “The original is still the best!” I think that also applies to Nestlé’s chocolate chips which is the only kind I use.
I rummaged through the “Easter” trunk of tissue-wrapped memories in my capacious mental attic where everything that I ever experienced is stored: Down near the bottom, there’s little Rose Mary in a pastel dress and hideous, hated Buster Brown oxfords. At a higher level, I am at Easter Sunrise service with some of the Nine Nifty Nicitinos before going to our church with Mother.
One year the Peeps had no eyes. Here Bill is, using a toothpick to dab on eyes for the Peeps in Vicki’s basket. Closer to the top, another layer, another memory: It seems as if it were only yesterday that Vicki’s little boys were standing next to our bed, giggling and blowing on the whirligigs from their Easter baskets.
My parents and siblings have been gone these many years, but the family feasts have continued either at Vicki’s home or ours. Last year we gathered here for the traditional ham dinner that also featured candied yams, green bean casserole and deviled eggs that I cussed about because the shells stuck tight when I peeled them so that the eggs looked as if mice had been nibbling them. Those little, giggling boys are grown men now with such things as beards, jobs, homes of their own, a wife and studies.
I saw a hilarious cartoon picturing two chocolate rabbits. One whose tail has been bitten off, says, “My butt hurts!” “What?” says the other bunny whose ears are gone.
Not that I foresee it, but if I were ever canonized I would be billed as “Saint Rose Mary of the Perpetual Diet.” I told Bill, “Don’t buy me any chocolate marshmallow eggs this year, and I won’t buy marshmallow peeps for you.” Sunday morning he handed me a carton of the eggs, a small chocolate rabbit and a piece of string. “I thought that you should have this.”
I giggled and turned over the memories in my trunk until I came to our family all gathered round after Mother’s Easter Feast, reminiscing about their youth during the Great Depression. Mother always said after the blessing, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone in the world could have such a meal.”
That would lead to the family’s recounting their memories of the Great Depression when they were cold and hungry because Daddy refused to accept government relief. They always ended with the story of the chocolate rabbit that someone gave me. My siblings who were starved for sweets thought that I would surely share with them. Not so. I fell in love with that rabbit, tied a string around its neck and dragged it along everywhere I went until it became so dirty and battered that no one would eat it.
This year we didn’t plan a family gathering, so Bill and I did something daring and totally different from the traditional ham dinner. Instead, we went out after church for Mexican food and margaritas, and a new memory is on the top layer of my trunk. Of course, some of the memories in my trunk are sad. However, there are many more happy ones that warm my heart.
wclarke@comcast.net