The other day I bought an Easter egg dye kit, which looked remarkably similar to the one I remember using as a kid many years ago. It seemed like a pretty good deal for two bucks. The eggs, on the other hand, are now a precious commodity so I opened the container to make sure none were pre-cracked before I got them home.
While I waited for the eggs to boil, I started wondering about when PAAS® Easter egg kits started and where the name came from, so I did a quick search online. According to the PAAS® website, “the original PAAS® Easter egg dye was invented by an American named William Townley. Mr. Townley owned a drug store in Newark, New Jersey, where he concocted recipes for home products. In the late 1800s, he came up with a recipe for Easter egg dye tablets that tinted eggs five cheerful colors. Neighborhood families started buying Townley’s Easter Egg Dye packets in 1881 for only five cents and mixed them with water and white vinegar to create the perfect egg dye! Soon, Mr. Townley realized that he had a wonderful product that other families would like to use to brighten their Easter tradition. He renamed his business the PAAS® Dye Company. The name PAAS® comes from ‘Passen,’ the word that his Pennsylvania Dutch neighbors used for Easter.”
Dyeing Easter eggs as a kid taught me that my creative visions can be bigger than my skill set and the tools at hand. I would imagine creating a basket filled with beautiful pastel-striped eggs, maybe with a few white polka dots and squiggles on them, thanks to the crayon I would draw with on the shells to keep the dye out and make interesting patterns.
But no matter how hard I tried to hold my hand still while lowering a hardboiled egg into the vinegary cup of pink dye using the official wire egg holder, it wobbled around in the liquid, messing up the straight lines. Sometimes it plopped off the wire altogether, settling at the bottom of the glass to become a solid pink egg with some faint lines and dots scribbled on it.
Luckily, there were five more chances to get it right, since my sister and I split a dozen eggs between us. By the time we were done, we had a carton full of brightly colored eggs, plus stained fingers to match, and a few fleeting thoughts of whether it would work to dip our Barbie dolls’ hair into the egg dye to make them look a little more festive.
Each year, we made a pact that whoever got up first had to wake the other one up so we could have an equal chance to find all the candy eggs the Easter bunny had hidden around our house. After racing around in our pajamas, looking on top of picture frames and under lampshades collecting them all, we’d settle in for a pre-breakfast sugar binge, nibbling the ears off chocolate bunnies and trading jellybeans between us for the colors we liked best.
Easter also meant wearing fancy matching outfits to church. I don’t think we were ever given a reason why and as a kid, I never thought to ask, but it was the one day a year my sister and I were dressed like we were identical twins born three years apart. Sometimes Mom mixed it up a little and bought us the same dress but in different colors. One year, our Wisconsin grandma sent us matching black plaid dresses with fancy velvet collars, so the plot to dress us alike went beyond our folks thinking it was cute. It also meant my sister was stuck with a second identical dress to wear after I grew out of it.
Today, as I was driving to work, I was struck by all the colors suddenly popping out everywhere: yellow daffodils and purple crocuses in roadside gardens, pink crabapple trees blooming along the sidewalks around town, long and spindly willow branches sprouting pale green leaves around Willow Lake, an Easter basket of colors everywhere I looked. It reminded me that beyond aisles of chocolate and Peeps of every flavor that fill the stores right now, April is a month of rebirth and renewal. And despite all the hard and terrible things that happen in the world around us, we still have so much to be grateful for each day.