Thank You Easter Bunny

Mom liked to overdo things - especially for the holidays. For example, for Valentine's Day she never bought us the $1.99 class pack of cards to hand out at school - no - Mom would special order Valentine's cards from a catalog that included a matching pencil and sticker.

Easter was no exception. I definitely remember the Easter baskets filled with hollow chocolate bunnies and plastic trinkets, but my most memorable Easters were the ones from my late teen years. Mom scrapped the Easter baskets and instead set up an Easter egg hunt for me and my older sisters. Yup. At the crack of Noon on Easter Sunday my sisters and I, still in our pajamas, would scour our family room for plastic eggs filled with cold, hard Easter cash.

Mom would get a variety of bills...$1, $5, $10, $20, and stash one in a hide-a-egg. She'd hide, say, 30 eggs and we each could gather 10 each. So, it was possible that the Easter Bunny could bring you $10 or $100, depending on your luck.

After we found our 10 eggs each, we'd sit on the floor and take turns opening our eggs. It was like we were on our own game show. There were "ooos and aaahs" with each egg opening. And, year after year and one by one, I would open 10, $1 eggs. My sister, Heather, the girl who loves money so much she used to wash and sort the coins in her coin jar on a regular basis as a kid, would open a series of $10 and $20 eggs. I think she could smell the bigger bills through the plastic eggs.

But then something magical would happen...the spirit of Easter became stronger than Heather's desire to horde cash, and she would offer to trade one of her twenties for one of my ones. I always quickly accepted the offer.

And the Easter Bunny would just sit back and smile.