Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Easter and Black Jelly Beans

Yesterday, while I was standing in the check out line at Rite Aid, I noticed an area by the register that was already stocked with a plethora of Easter items.

Bright colored baskets, plastic grass, chocolate hallowed bunnies, marshmallow peeps, and my absolute favorite…..bags and bags of jelly beans.

I love jelly beans.

Especially the black ones.

I’ve noticed something about black jelly beans though, people seem to either love or abhorred them.

I happen to worship them.

And when I eat them, I can’t just put one or two in my mouth, no, I like to throw in four or five or ten, so that my tongue, teeth, and lips turn permanently black from the food coloring. I usually end up looking like someone from the movie, The Night of the Living Dead.

Anyway…seeing all the Easter stuff, reminded me of something that I used to do as a kid during the Easter Holidays.

Just like on Christmas Eve, my parents would wait until my siblings and I went to bed, and then they would decorate the dining room table, as if the Easter Bunny had just visited. We each got a big basket, stuffed with green plastic grass and an array of fabulous candy. And in those days, there was such a thing as a REAL coconut cream Easter egg, which would literally melt in your mouth - we each got one of those too.

After my parents finished, and went to bed…I would creep downstairs and go through my sister and brothers’ baskets; taking all but one or two black jelly beans, and then hiding them under the grass in my own basket. I would also switch the different flavored jelly beans around; making sure I got more of the pink and white ones, while my siblings were left with more of the red, green and orange ones. And since I hated peeps, I would give them half of mine, but swapped them for a few of their malted speckled eggs.

This rearranging probably took me a good 30 minutes, so sometimes I would just start eating candy from everyone else’s basket.

But I had a special camouflaging trick that I used, so it never looked like anything was missing.

I would fluff-out the plastic grass in their baskets, so it actually looked like they had more candy.

*This trick later helped me when I attended beauty school and was learning how to tease hair.

So after I finally got my Easter basket filled with exactly what I wanted, I crept back upstairs and slid into my bed like a snake.

And as I fell asleep, I couldn’t help but wonder if my parents ever noticed what I was doing each year.

Naaah…I don’t think so….