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Celebrating Easter with hardboiled eggs on random Sundays

Like Thanksgiving, Easter is one of those "moving target" holidays. It has no fixed date, just a promiscuous relationship with a handful of Sundays and the vernal equinox. Or something. If I remember correctly, Thanksgiving has similar dalliances with the Thursdays in November but it amounts to the same disregard for commitment. Sundays, Thursdays - blondes and brunettes. I never know when one of these holidays is going to swing through town and mess up my weekend.

It's only because I happened to browse over to sonomanews.com and caught the headline "Easter activities around the Valley" that I realized the date was upon us. Shame on me.

Still, I can't help but feel Easter is like an old college roommate who's still single and partying and who wants to crash at your pad. Suddenly, the dishes pile up, the house gets trashed and three weeks later you find something behind the couch that requires a haz-mat suit to remove.

In this case, it'll be a wayfaring Easter egg. This is why most people hide Easter eggs outside, but since we live in an apartment, any foodstuffs stashed around the building are fair game for the homeless. And even if we manage to find all the eggs that our wee son will undoubtedly decide to forfeit once his hands are full, we then face the onus of having to eat them. One can only consume so many deviled eggs and egg salad sandwiches. Even though our kid professes an interest in hardboiled eggs that would impress Cool Hand Luke, a single egg usually does the trick and that's after he's rolled the yolk away like a marble.

Maybe we should skip the eggs this year. The kid doesn't understand Easter anyway. He's two-ish and in his religion, the fact that he can Velcro his own shoes is a miracle. Other miracles include falling asleep in one location and awakening in another, the Diaper Champ and the magic box that turns bread into "doast" because it is "Hot! No touch!" He can eat "doast" more effectively now that he has molars, which recently arrived over a few sleepless nights and are probably why my wife is "Hot! No touch!" as well.

I'm not alone in my lack of Easter preparedness. If you Google the word, the second listing is the panicked query, "When is Easter 2011?" Isn't there an online alert or something chaps like me can subscribe to so we can get a frickin' basket for the kid without having to miss Saturday Night Live? That would be a miracle.
Then there's this whole issue with coloring eggs. The eggs in our house are brown because they come from the farmers market and make us feel less guilty about exploiting the reproductive resources of chickens.

I'm not even sure if you dye brown eggs. It seems to me they might look a little evil and I'm not sure I want that kind of vibe under the couch for the better part of a month. Perhaps I should just stick to the chocolate bunny so the kid can get a jump on his Ozzy Osborne routine and use his new teeth to bite its head off.

Sigh. I used to celebrate with that college roommate - we'd crucify our livers until we passed out crossed-eyed and then sleep the rest of the weekend, rising on the third day to clink a couple of hefeweizens over an omelet. Throughout, he'd present his treatise on Christian appropriation of Pagan rituals and I'd pretend to listen, all the while wondering how I got stuck in the tower with Buck Mulligan in the first place.

Now, Easter is like family game night and it's my turn to roll - hope I land on the right day.

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Daedalus Howell wishes you a happy Easter at SonomaReporter.com.