The Chocolate Bunny Banquet

SOMERSET, MICHIGAN
Easter 1970s
For Tuni

For as long as I got Easter baskets, for as long as I can remember, I got a chocolate bunny and never ate it. It would crouch on top of the Easter grass, the same grass we used year after year, in the same basket that was mine year after year, while the jelly beans and the malted speckled birds eggs and the pastel mallow-creem chicks and the foil covered chocolate eggs would slowly or rapidly get eaten. The bunny would start on Easter morning leaning against the handle of the basket and eventually hop to the middle of the grass until all the surrounding candy was gone.

“Can I have your bunny?” my brothers would ask. “When are you going to eat that thing?” my parents would ask. The answers were: no and never. The bunny would remain on top of the grass, and when the Easter baskets were carted off to the attic until next year, it would be sleeping underneath the grass at the bottom of the basket with the bunnies of past years. I never ever ate the bunnies.

I couldn’t bear to undress the bunny from its sort of shiny, mainly crinkled foil. It would lose all personality, instantly. There was often barely an indentation on each side of its bunny head where its bunny eyes should be, there was just a lump of chocolate for its bunny tail. And the foil, carefully removed and flattened and smoothed, would cause the charming bunny face to become misshapen; best to leave the wrapper right on the rabbit, I thought.

And, I found, there was too much decision involved with eating the bunny: unwrap the whole thing or just part? eat it in pieces or all at once? tail first or ears? I couldn’t do it, couldn’t eat the bunny. There were the questions to be resolved and then, after I ate it, I wouldn’t even have it anymore. So I stuck to simple one-bite candies, the eggs and the beans and the strange little creem shapes. My brothers of course never noticed any of this; they were too busy licking the chocolate off their fingers, leaving their balled up foil on the floor.

Every few years, the Easter Bunny, on his or her annual trip to the attic to retrieve the baskets and fill them with fresh candy, would notice an unusually high mound of grass in the basket that was mine. On those Easter mornings I would find my basket missing the bunnies I remembered from previous years (and once, missing a cunning white chocolate Scotty dog complete with wee plaid cloth doggy coat across his back). When I would ask, I was told that the chocolate was bad after months and years of melting and freezing and melting and freezing, under the Easter grass up in the attic and so the bunnies were tossed away, never to be had again.

Now that I am older I can see that they were the bunnies of sweet opportunity, a foil ripping reckless feast, to be devoured with passion down from the ears or up from the tail, it doesn’t matter as long as long as you are alive and sticky and smeared with chocolate pleasure. Who knows how many bunnies I let go rancid for fear of not being able to decide how to eat?

I was reminded recently that we get an Easter basket daily from God; He calls it a banquet and it’s open twenty-four seven, you just show up and it is there all ready fixed, fresh as can be, step right up and serve yourself, all you can eat. We are supposed to enjoy the banquet, not hide it away until it spoils.

I believe this now: we are not to worry about the wrapping or the direction in which to proceed or how much to bite off for fear we can’t chew. God will give us a chocolate bunny banquet whenever we want. Just eat the bunny.