Easter Rituals Aren’t Only for the Kids

For weeks she has been asking: How many more days until Easter . . . until baskets crammed with chocolate eggs, another stuffed bunny for her menagerie, a frilly dress and shiny, new, patent-leather shoes that squeak?

I have marked off the calendar days alongside her . . . but my countdown is on different terms.

How much more time do I have to find a bargain on chocolate bunnies and marshmallow chicks, to rummage through the garage for last year’s plastic eggs, to scour discount stores for trinkets for their baskets, to assemble the fixings for our Easter cookies?

And I find myself counting the years as well . . . how long before we can drop this charade. When do they outgrow their need for these silly traditions, let these kiddie rituals go?

When my three girls were still little, it seemed more privilege than chore . . . the cookie-baking, egg-decorating, Easter basket routine.

We’d stand together at the kitchen counter for hours, swiping frosting on bunny-shaped cookies, dying eggs bright shades of pink, yellow and green. When they thrilled on Easter morning at the sight of the Easter Bunny’s bounty, their happiness delighted me.

And I felt blessed--if exhausted--when we trundled off to church that morning, my girls in dresses smeared with chocolate, with new barrettes clipped on their ponytails.

But the rituals lost their luster as my children grew beyond simple Easter basket trinkets, like baby rattles and plastic bracelets and tiny, stick-on earrings.

There is something incongruous in the notion of an Easter Bunny packing ‘N Sync stickers, a toe ring and a set of henna tattoos in the candy baskets he brings to once-little girls, now 9, 11 and 14.

“Somehow,” I complain to my friends, “I figured we’d be done with this by now.” I presumed that my children would be ready to put aside the tchotchkes and the Easter bunny routine, and treat this holiest of days more reverentially.

And I long for a holiday when I can make it through a sunrise service without shaking cobwebs from my head, after a late night assembling Easter baskets in these few hours between the time the oldest goes to the bed and the youngest rises to greet the dawn.

When does it end, I ask my friend Kimber, whose youngest child is in middle school.

“End?” she repeats. “I don’t know if it does.”

My heart sinks when I realize she, too, is still a hostage to the machinations of Easter Eve. In 14 years, her children have yet to rise on Easter morning without finding a trail of jelly beans leading from their bedroom doors to whatever secret place the Easter Bunny has hidden their baskets in.

Never mind that they admitted long ago they know Mom is really the Easter Bunny. It’s a tradition that ties them to this holiday, and they’re not ready to let it go.

By Easter weekend, our kitchen always looks like a tornado blew through . . . the floor stained with egg dye, the counters spattered with dough, the table piled high with plates of cookies and cartons of decorated eggs.

And at some point, I end an evening alone, hunched over the kitchen counter, listening to hymns and gospel-music CDs, while I press jelly-bean “eggs” into the center of puffy, little “bird’s nest” cookies.

The children will have scattered to their rooms by now, to talk on the phone or watch TV. And I will wind up feeling resentful. . . . After all I’ve done, they’ve abandoned me.

At least I did until last Easter, when my youngest daughter wandered into the kitchen and climbed onto the counter alongside me.

“I thought you guys liked making cookies,” I said, as she watched me roll the little balls of dough. “How come nobody’s helping me?”

“We do like making cookies,” she said, dipping her fingers into the bowl of batter. “But these are your cookies. These are the ones you always make . . . we don’t really like them.”

I looked over at the plateful of cookies I’d baked; they sat untouched among the sugar-cookie bunnies and butter cookies shaped like Easter eggs. And I realized she was right. My girls might gobble a few jelly beans, but no one ever eats these cookies but me.

I make them because I always make them; because, for every Easter I can remember, I always have.

Because traditions are not just for children. Because Mommy relies on her rituals, too.

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E-mail: sandy.banks@latimes.com.