Easter Bunnies: The Real March Madness

I love Santa Claus. I'm all about the Tooth Fairy. I wish I lived on Sesame Street and vacationed in Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. I think Walt Disney is a genius who based most of his movies on true stories, and I've always thought of Pee-Wee's Playhouse as the perfect place to spend my golden years.

The quintessential man-rabbit

But I hate the Easter Bunny.

Admittedly its an awful thing for me to say, especially with five young kids at home - but its true, nonetheless.

No - I'm not a curmudgeon or an atheist, and I don't even see myself as a grumpy old man (yet). I honor Easter and all of its traditions (and all of its kielbasa), I just have a very strong, very rational distaste for what has become the modern symbol of the Easter holiday.

Let's start with the obvious: he's a rabbit. A large, over-sized, over-fed rabbit with the same physiological properties of a man. A "man-rabbit", if you will. He either exists through some freak genetic mutation or - the more likely scenario - some government-sponsored radioactivity experiment gone awry. But instead of turning into a green monster and smashing cars and buildings (see: Hulk, The Incredible), he hops from house to house hiding eggs full of jellybeans for little boys and girls to enjoy.

Seriously? How can we even say that with a straight face? We all know Santa Claus is real because we see fat white guys with beards walking around every day; but even the youngest of the young don't take long to figure out that giant walking man-rabbits simply don't exist.

How is this fun?

Which bring me to my second point: rabbits. Rabbits are animals... and animals can be scary, especially to little kids. They don't communicate like us, they make sudden movements and, according to pretty much every fairy tale ever told, they eat small children. A few of my kids are scared of the little tiny bunny in the little tiny cage at our local orchard... so one could only imagine what happens when we threw throw them on the lap of a 200-pound bunny with a big grinning mouth. Then to make matters worse you have to picture that very same man-rabbit hopping through your house - opening drawers, messing-up the couch cushions, hiding stuff. Hell, its enough to creep me out, let alone my kids. Yes, Santa creepy-crawls around the house too, but at least Santa is nice. And jolly. He slides down the chimney and eats cookies and leaves presents. Sure your house smells like stale pipe tobacco when he leaves, but at least he's not pawing his way through your silverware drawer.

You can't tell me there's not
something wrong with this guy.

And speaking of Santa: you can talk to him. You can reason with him and tell him what you want. You can explain to him why even though you cut your sister's pigtails off you still deserve presents  But no such luck with the Easter Bunny, because as everyone knows bunnies don't talk... or read... or do much of anything for that matter. They're just bunnies.

I think I was six or seven when I found out there was no such thing as an Easter Bunny; and while that discovery was in an of itself a relief, it did lead to a far more sobering line of logical reasoning. My parents said there's an Easter Bunny... but I know there's no Easter Bunny... but they said there was one... so they're not telling the truth... and if they're not telling the truth about the Easter Bunny, what else aren't they telling the truth about? At some point all kids will discover their parents are not perfect... but I can't think of a dumber thing to waste away their innocence on than a goddamn six-foot bunny.

We absolutely need man-rabbits to trick Elmer Fudd and to steal Trix cereal, but we don't need them to enjoy a holiday. Let's work together, people... let's stop the madness. Let's stop the Easter Bunny!

Beginnings

About ten years ago, before I had any children, I developed what could only be described as a most unusual obsession: locating, obtaining and - ultimately - watching the first-ever episode of Sesame Street.

Of course it goes without saying that like every other American born in the 1970’s, I loved Sesame Street. Bert and Ernie, Kermit the Frog, that mean bastard Oscar… they were all just as much a part of my family as my parents, my brother and my fish (named Sugar, who suffered quite the untimely demise at the hands of my brother’s Fisher Price baby vacuum cleaner - but that’s a story for another time). Yet in all my years and through all the hours of quality Sesame time I had amassed, I had never once seen how it all began.

Maybe Big Bird hatched from an egg or Super Grover used his magic powers to make the street appear; or maybe even Mr. Hooper fell asleep next to Suzanne Pleshette and dreamt the whole thing up. Either way, I wanted to see it - I had to know; so I scoured the Internet, looking for clues until finally I found someone on eBay selling a VHS cassette version of exactly what I was looking for.

The tape cost about $60, and when it finally arrived in the mail, I was like a kid on Christmas - tearing open the package, rushing into the living room, impatiently waiting for the cassette to play. And when it finally did I was crushed.

No bird’s egg.

No Super Grover.

No Suzanne Pleshette.

Oscar was orange and Big Bird was sort of goofy looking; but otherwise, the on-screen commencement of the single most identifiable children’s show on the planet was nothing special. I stopped the tape about five minutes in and realized: I wasn’t obsessed with Sesame Street… I was obsessed with beginnings.

Nice beginnings.

Clean beginnings.

Affixed, finite, “yes – this is where we’re starting from” beginnings - like Peter Parker getting bit by a radioactive spider, or Diane Chambers wandering into Cheers, or God creating the Heaven and Earth… or the unambiguous, unwavering declaration that Marley is, in fact, dead to begin with.

Which brings us to the present… in which I’ve begun writing a blog and you’ve (presumably) begun reading it; and to the extent that I will continue to write (which I will) and that you will continue to read (which I hope you will), I’d like to begin appropriately, with a clean beginning:

• I’m 33-years-old.
• I’m married (sorry ladies).
• My wife and I have five young children.
• We live in suburban Connecticut.
• I’m a writer.

And above all else: I’m a dork… because if searching for an obscure episode of a PBS children’s show doesn’t define dork-dom, writing a blog most certainly does.

Happy Beginning!