Easter Morning Before Anyone Else Is Awake

There is a basket in my front hall closet that gets pulled out exactly once a year, woven from a pale straw that has gone a little flat on one side from being stacked under winter coats for eleven months. It was my aunt’s, given to me the spring after she passed, and I never use it for anything but this one morning.

Easter in my house is the only holiday I still do entirely alone before anyone else is up, and I have come to guard that hour more than I probably should.

The hiding happens before sunrise

I am up while the house is still dark, moving through the downstairs in the quiet way you learn after enough years of not wanting to wake anyone. The eggs get hidden the night before, boiled and dyed after everyone has gone to bed, but the small gifts, the chocolate and the little toys, those I tuck around the living room and dining room in the very early morning, because I like the idea that they appeared while everyone was asleep rather than the evening before while people were still wandering through the rooms.

I do not hide things cleverly anymore. When my children were small I put eggs on top of picture frames and behind couch cushions, spots that took real searching. Now that it is grandchildren doing the hunting, I keep everything low and obvious, because I remember too well the year my youngest cried over an egg she could not find and I do not need to relearn that lesson twice.

The table gets set with the pale dishes

I have a set of dishes with a faint pastel border, yellow and green, that come out only for Easter, kept in the same cabinet the rest of the year behind the everyday plates. Setting that table is one of the few decorating tasks I still do for this holiday. I do not put up much else, no garlands or window clings, just the dishes and a small arrangement of whatever is starting to bloom outside, usually daffodils if they have come up in time.

My aunt used to say Easter did not need much decoration because the yard was already doing the work. I understand that better every spring.

Once the house wakes up

The hunt itself takes maybe fifteen minutes once everyone is dressed and let loose in the yard and living room, which always feels short compared to how much time went into hiding everything. I sit on the porch step and watch rather than help, because the watching is the part I actually look forward to, more than the hiding.

After the hunt, the baskets get carried inside and set on the kitchen table while I finish the meal, usually a ham again, though a smaller one than Christmas, and a dish of deviled eggs made from whichever hard boiled eggs did not end up dyed and hidden the night before.

The dyeing happens the day before, not the morning of

I learned a long time ago not to dye eggs the morning of Easter itself. There is not enough time, and rushing it means the dye never sets properly and everyone’s hands end up stained through dinner. Now the dyeing is its own smaller occasion the Saturday before, done at the kitchen table with newspaper spread out to catch the drips, the same vinegar smell filling the kitchen that has filled it every Easter Saturday for as long as I can remember doing this.

What comes down afterward

There is not much to put away after Easter, which is part of why I like it. The pale dishes get washed and go back behind the everyday plates. The straw basket gets folded flat as it will fold and returns to the closet shelf. The daffodils, if they lasted, stay in their vase on the table for another few days until they wilt.

By Monday the house looks entirely ordinary again, no sign anything happened beyond a few stray strands of plastic grass that turn up in the corners of the living room for weeks, the kind of thing you find under a couch in July and wonder for a second where it came from before you remember.

I think what I like about Easter is how little trace it leaves. Christmas takes over the whole house for six weeks. Easter is a single morning, gone almost as soon as it arrives, and maybe that is why I hold onto that early quiet hour before anyone wakes up as tightly as I do. It is the one part of the day that belongs only to me.

The one egg that never gets found

Every single year, without fail, at least one egg goes missing entirely, hidden too well or too low, tucked behind a planter or under a porch step, and it turns up weeks later, usually by smell before it turns up by sight. I have long since stopped feeling bad about it. It has become its own small tradition, the missing egg of the year, and my husband and I have a running joke about which room it will turn up in this time.