Talk about the Easter Bunny and the temptation of chocolate treats everywhere I go has given me a new outlook on this annual tradition. I often connect chocolate to the other guilty pleasure. You know the one. This year, I have figured out how to have my chocolate and eat it too.
In childhood, a hunt for Easter eggs was a spring highlight. It was the ultimate game of “hide and seek,” rewarded with enough sugar to coat my teeth for a grand total of 14 cavities in one fell swoop. Somewhere in Durham County, there is a dentist who retired well off from the sum paid by my parent’s insurance company. Ah, good times. Back then, the big rabbit with the goodies was the pusher of my candy addiction.
In university days, the myth of the bunny was long gone, but gifts still arrived Easter Sunday. My Mom was a sucker for sentimental traditions. She always invested in the good chocolate. She raised my standards.
Now I’m the Mommy and the dentist bills here equal the sum required to build my class-action lawsuit against the Big Rabbit, the fat guy in the red suit, Cupid the Valentine and the Halloween Spirit. My kids need a sugar-rush like Charlie Sheen needs another hit of tiger-blood shooters.
Maybe I’m not as nice as my Mom was, because instead of an Easter egg hunt, I am contemplating hiding things that will cause my children to lift things up and look beneath them, sort of like simulating cleaning. I think instead of foil-wrapped eggs and pastel coloured jellybeans, we should hide the Nintendo DS and those ridiculously tiny games, with the silly little pen thing that makes those games work. And while we’re at it, let’s hide the Wii remote, maybe some Lego pieces too. Perhaps I’ll separate the socks and hide one from each pair. I wonder if my family would even notice. Since it’s play-off season, I could hide the channel-changer too. Then maybe, just maybe, somebody would get up and look for the stuff that badly needed to be put away in the first place.
You might think me cruel, but admit it, you like the idea. Like me, you are tired of being the all-knowing seer of the whereabouts of all things. I have become the detective of crap, the search and rescue of the frequently discarded but instantly precious things my children cannot find.
I want to retire that post. I want to ignore these requests and watch the frantic search go on without me. While everyone searches for his or her stuff, I want to put my feet up and sit back and indulge with a nice piece of chocolate. Dark chocolate. I want to enjoy the sensation of rich, organic, fair-trade chocolate torn recklessly from a thin, hard slab of a fragrant chocolate bar, flavoured delicately with a hint of raspberry or perhaps a nice orange pairing, and savour the experience of it melting goodness ever so slowly. Ah, yes.
Ahem. Excuse me. That was a private moment. See? I get distracted. The guilty pleasure of watching other people do housework is almost as sensual as chocolate.
Almost.
Gee, did you think I had a different guilty pleasure? Johnny Depp in rabbit ears? Nope. Chocolate cures that.