Egg Elegance: The Gordon Family Easter Egg

               Plastic eggs constitute a plebian way to provide color and capsuled confection to the celebration of Easter.  Easter Bunnies do not lay plastic eggs.

               Easter Bunnies do lay eggs, though.  Not regular eggs, but colorful and fragile Easter eggs: varied in color, filled with candy, and topped with a special “fluffy, bunny tail.” I never questioned this quirk of nature.
               Saving the shells for months prior to the dying ritual was a task, but one that perpetuated the tradition of our Easter Bunny. Pink, yellow, green, purple, blue – all colors of spring provided the spectrum for the weekly color fest, which must be performed in secret, as when children are at school or asleep.  That egg shell-dying egg-stravaganza, however, was only the beginning of the adventure for creating the one and only Gordon Family Easter Egg.
                   Family members began by buying or saving tissue paper or finding crepe paper such as the paper which creates the frills on a piñata….colorful, festive, and fragile, the kind that if wet or handled too much stains fingertips.
                Various hues of crepe paper (tissue paper) are cut into 4”x4” squares (could be a tad larger).  Don’t be stingy with the paper. It is folded, accordion style. You’ll have a “fan” about 4” tall. Cut ribbons down into the crepe paper, down to about ¾ -1”, leaving enough folded paper to fit snugly into the small open top of the empty egg shell. Scissors are used to curl the ends of each sheet of the crepe paper ribbon, like you would curl a ribbon for a package. Be careful not to rip the paper when curling it. The result should appear as a fluffy, puffy, curly “Bunny Tail” fashioned in a multitude of spring colors.  Match or Mix the toppers to the dyed egg shells.

                Fill the colored egg shells with candy corn, lemon drops, Hershey’s Kisses, jelly beans, M&M’s, and add a colorful topper.  With some degree of loving effort, you have created a masterpiece: a really awesome, authentic, and fragile, Gordon Family Easter egg.          (Photos are of my baby brother, Thomas Gordon Dansby, Easter, 1954.)