(An American tale of children, mutant rabbits, and flak jackets)
~-~-~-~-~-~

Looking for ways to add some spice to your next Easter Egg Hunt? Here’s an idea: call in an air strike.

Not long ago, my church held its annual Easter Egg Hunt, and I had a chance to volunteer my valuable services, which begin with my uncanny ability to recognize an egg, and end with my unmatched talent of being able to spot an entirely different egg. Obviously, my church family welcomed my participation; after all, cognitive skills of such scope generally don’t come cheap.

That morning, as I arrived, I noticed a couple of nondescript guys taking good advantage of the broad, clear field that separates the church from the facing road. The pair were spending their Saturday morning flying a remote-control fighter jet up and over and around the field. “This works,” I reasoned. “How better to add that just-right touch of missing mania than to combine candy-crazed children with an atavistic pagan ritual and the potential threat of being randomly strafed by enemy fire?”

But, ultimately, the ever-eager local news stations were denied. The closest we came to actual physical danger occurred while the designated grown-ups were hiding the eggs, when someone discovered an undiscovered egg from LAST year and nearly ate the rancid foil-covered chocolate hidden within. Not exactly a Homeland Security color-code switcher, but it did provide a moment of tension.

How, do you suppose, did our country come to embrace this seasonal tradition? Where did this unlikely egg-laying Easter Bunny come from? What does this fertile little chocolate-pushing Peep pimp have to do with Easter?

And most importantly: somewhere, there’s a company that makes all that fake plastic grass we shove inside the Easter baskets. What do they do the rest of the year?

History tells us that Christopher Columbus did not, in fact, discover the Easter Bunny, because George Bush unfairly quarantined the poor little animal at Gitmo during the infamous Cheney Purges that followed a vile, government-conspiracy-backed attack on New York City real estate during th…

Oh, wait. Sorry. That’s what revisionist history tells us. I’ll begin again.

History tells us that many cultures have worshiped, or at least honored, or at least respected, or at least eaten, eggs. An ancient Latin phrase, Omne vivum ex ovo, makes the claim that “all life comes from an egg,” a maxim attributed to an oft-quoted Roman Prostate, Foghornus Leghornus. This, however, cannot be confirmed, since the Prostate was ambushed in the year MCHAMMR by a myopic midget, Elmer Fuddus, during the Ides of Sweeps Week.

But the legend may precede Rome. According to my research, conducted in-between hourly emails teasing me to switch car insurance companies, the ancient Persians painted eggs for Nowrooz, their celebration of the New Year, which for the Persians began on the Spring Aquanauts, probably because nobody could spell “January.”

Later, during medieval times (literal translation: “oh, about 50% evil”), people were forbidden to eat eggs during Lent, but nobody told the medieval chickens. So every year, as the Lenten season approached, tradition called for households to hurry up and eat all their on-hand eggs, and this logically led to another tradition known as Pancake Day. Well, of course it did.

At one point in time, people believed that eggs laid on Good Friday were particularly special. If you held on to these special eggs for 100 years, legend predicted that two things would happen:

1) The egg yolks would turn to solid gold

2) You would be dead

The Anglo-Saxons had a noted fondness for Eastre, the goddess of Spring. To other groups, she was variously known as Eostre, The Egg Babe, Peep Woman, and Jennifer Anniston. The Germans called her Ostara, a name simply dreamed up by that rascal, story-teller Jakob Grimm, whose brother Ben went on to become an entirely fictional character and helped found the Fantastic Four.

In northern England, a traditional Easter-time game has players hitting each other’s hard-boiled eggs. Apparently, the citizenry get quite excited about this group activity, and if you’ve ever watched cricket, you can sympathize. The traditional game is known, for obvious reasons, as “egg jarping.” Well, of course it is.

A very similar game is a crowd pleaser in the Republic of Srpska (pronounced “Cleveland”), but for obvious, logical reasons, they call it “tucanje” (literal translation: “celebrity vampire bowling”). Well, of cpzet they dahj.

Oddly enough, a very similar game is played in southern Louisiana, where the locals refer to the activity as “Pocking Eggs,” and if I started right now, and lived till my yolks gilded, I’d still be coming up with impolite jokes for that one.

One more historical note: I’m told that the Passover Seder rituals include dipping a hard-boiled egg in salt water, which symbolizes new life, and totally rules out any hope of anyone getting a nice omelet.

But that’s their business. My job is to observe, not to judge.

Meanwhile, back here at home: our egg hunt went well…for a while. We had scheduled a first round of egg-hunting, then a little diversionary craft-making time while the grown-ups collected and re-hid the eggs, then a second round. We managed to hide all the eggs for the first round, and the church grounds were absolutely dripping with festive little plastic eggs, red and pink, green and yellow, striped and polka-dotted, and even a few that had been painted like guerilla military camouflage (I’m guessing it was a male grown-up who dreamed that up).

As a witness to the egg-hunting contest, I learned something, too. Unlike grown-ups, children, when asked to declare how many eggs they found, will just tell you the truth. No greed, no guile, no raging ego. Just…the truth.

How refreshing.

But then, before the second round, signals somehow got mixed. Suddenly, sugar-saturated kids erupted from the building for “Egg Hunt: The Sequel” before we had finished hiding all the eggs. So I just started lobbing eggs out of my little Egg Master bag, randomly jarping them at incoming children, occasionally checking the sky for incoming artillery. Soon, I had this odd, Pied Piper-like, tailing appendage of small humans. Three of them followed me home.

So now I have three new, cute, little chocolate-stained tax deductions, and free lawn care.

And I’m glad they’re here. I’ll need their help to keep an eye on these rogue guerilla eggs.