Happy Easter Everybunny!

The kids are jacked up on sugar and fighting over their piles and sneaking treats just like Nov. 1st. Easter has become the new Halloween, methinks.

For awhile it seemed that Halloween was becoming more restrained, but it's really just more diversified. Instead of Snickers or 3 Musketeers, we now have OPTIONS. Healthy snacks: pretzels, Goldfish, fruit thingys made with actual fruit. And toys: silly teeth, spiders, pencils (that are mostly decorative as I find them impossible to sharpen), other goofy plastic stuff.

Choices are good, right? But for some reason, the more options, the bigger tendency to get one of each, so it seems you wind up with larger total quantities of stuff.

Although I applaud the lower sugar snacks and the toys for what they are trying to do - namely limit the candy footprint - it seems to not be making much of a dent in the average Halloween haul. And as evil as fun-size candy bars are, at least they disappear. Quickly. Usually starting with the Take 5 and Almond Joys. (I'm so selfless to protect my kids from all this by taking the hit myself. Now... where is my feed bag?) The toys - linger, break, still linger on. And the amount of plastic is overwhelming. Less stuff means more sugar; there really isn't a good alternative here.

Note the conspicuous absence of any discussion of the contemporary role of Parent as Wet Blanket. That deserves an entry all its own.

Here are some neat Easter ideas, heard on the playground:

Choose useful items such as sand pails for the Easter basket - that way they have a second life around the house.

Goodwill always has zillions of used baskets so each year it can be 'new' to your kids.

If you don't want to buy new baskets each year, tell the kids the Easter bunny needs to know where to leave the loot, so they need to choose their own basket to put out. Like a Christmas stocking, sort of.

The plastic eggs multiply when you're not looking. (Hello, left by a bunny? C'mon now.) Of course reusing them is the best option, provided you can locate them each year. You can also snap them shut on loops of yarn and hang them from a tree for decorations. At the preschool the kids got to pick lentils, peas, beans to put in their egg, then it was sealed up with colorful electrical tape and voila - rhythm section. Or both: hang a bunch of eggs filled with lentils on your trees and drive your neighbors nuts.

Or skip the plastic eggs altogether. When we were kids, my parents would hide foil-covered chocolate eggs all over the place. This was much more challenging. For the second year, we hid a bunch today for the kids and it took them a good twenty minutes and I still see a couple tricksy ones lurking about. Extra props if you order the eggs from www.fowlerschocolate.com, unbelievably yummy. Try the orange chocolate sponge candy. It's too wonderful to explain.

We didn't get around to dyeing Easter eggs this year. I'm the only one who eats hardboiled eggs, so it's a bit much. And to be honest, I really don't like the egg dyeing kits available. When we were kids there were bottles of dye, I think Paas - complete with bunny head stoppers - that you'd swirl around in a bowl. The dye would float on the surface, so as you dipped in your egg you got awesome multicolor streaks and swirls. Think marbled paper. They were beautiful. Of course cleanup was a nightmare and they were probably made of substances too toxic to be sold these days, but nostalgia persists. So crayons, stickers and single pastel colors... well, pale by comparison. Let the record show I actually did score an egg-decorating kit at Goodwill a couple of months ago. I squirreled it away. Maybe I'll find it in time for next year.