By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
My grandfather Don O’Brien (1891-1963) was a writer too. For roughly the last decade of his life in the mid-1900s, he wrote a newspaper column several times each week about life and living in his home of Burlington, Vermont. The columns often reminisced about his boyhood there, as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth.
Here is an Easter story from his Burlington Free Press column on April 6, 1953:
Rambling Reveries Of Earlier Easters
Easter Sunday reveries – pictures come to mind of earlier Easters, of the customs and the joys of that circle of young gentlemen in which I moved – before the days of long pants and the pangs of fashion consciousness.
We got dressed up, of course, and went to church. Several of us had altar-boy duties in the Cathedral. The surplices and soutanes, vestures of our privilege to serve within the sanctuary, were thus our most important Easter garb.
Before that, though, came breakfast. And I recall there was keen competition among the kids in the matter of eating eggs. On our first get-together of the day, we would recount our accomplishments in the morning consumption of hen fruit. The numbers were wont to grow – like the size of a fish – in the telling.
Family dinner – and still dressed up, somewhat uncomfortable in the restrictions of Easter finery.
But after dinner it was off with the new and on with the old! Then the traditional afternoon procedure was a hike, with no well-defined destination we’d head for the open spaces. A snake would probably strain his back trying to follow the trail we left.
We wandered, explored, collected a curious assortment of souvenirs of the trek – usually articles (and perhaps wildlife) which were viewed with distaste, not to say alarm, on arrival home – and banished to exterior places.
One particular highlight of Easter in our house recalls itself to me. My cousin, Fred (Jerry) McCarthy, God rest him, and I would each receive a one-pound box of mixed chocolates. This wonderful prize was a reward, so to speak, for our having abstained from candy throughout Lent.
Long deprivation from sweets got the best of me one Easter Sunday. Piece by piece, I managed to put away nearly the whole contents of the box. The last luscious chocolate cream I forced down did it. I collapsed.
I couldn’t even look at a hunk of candy for a long, long time.
Either the incident repeated itself, or Grandfather Don gave a few more details on it a year later, in his Burlington Free Press column for April 2, 1954:
The approach of Easter Sunday brings to mind that in my boyhood days that holy day used to bring its material as well as spiritual blessings.
In consideration of the will power, the strength of character and the self-sacrifice which I brought to bear upon my annual fast from candy during the holy season of Lent, I could count on getting a one-pound box of chocolates when Easter dawned.
This reward of virtue almost became the means of making me give up candy permanently.
Shortly after breakfast this particular Easter Sunday, I opened the fancy box and proceeded to send large hunks of chocolate creams and nougats down on top of the half-dozen or so eggs it was customary for me to put away at the first meal on that glorious day.
You see, at the inevitable conclave of the gang later on, the question would quickly come up, “How many eggs didja eat this morning, huh? Only six? Shucks, you ain’t no egg eater, I gobbled up eight!” And so on.
Anyway, when the chocolate delicacies got down there with the more plebeian eggs, the eggs got their yolks up and snarled, “Who the heck invited you here? On your way, bums!”
“Oh, yeah?” came back the chocolates,“So you got a lease on this guy’s stomach, hey? Well, leave us see you make it stick!”
Now, the chocolate candy couldn’t be blamed for not knowing that Easter was a day especially for the eggs, not to mention the large slab of ham steak which, by custom, was companion to the product of boastful hens. And the eggs, of course, resented the intrusion of the candy.
So one began shoving the other around and first thing you know there was a full-fledged brannigan going. The thing got under way while I was en route for my regular Easter Sunday visit to the home of “Uncle” Andrew and “Aunt” Minnie Charland, longtime family friends.
The egg-chocolate brawl hit its peak just as I arrived. I had turned a delicate chartreuse. Aunt Minnie screamed and made a dash for the medicine cabinet.
Ever since then I’ve respected the traditional Easter priority of eggs.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
