An Easter

bucket

memory

April 8, 2007

The baby started walking four days before Easter.

She'd taken a few steps randomly here and there over the course of the last month, but this week she finally put all the pieces together and walked from one end of the room to the other.

Her 3-year old big brother was thrilled by this course of events. Because she can now walk, he sits in his car and makes her push him around the room.

It's a sight bound to bring a tear to your eye - an extremely tall, 40-pound 3-year-old being pushed in a giant red and yellow plastic car by a petite 11-month-old who takes unsteady baby steps but whom is nonetheless thrilled to push her bother, er, brother, around.

The tear it brings to your eye is typically due to hysterical laughter.

I have taken several photos of her walking and have captured it a few times on video for her daddy to view when he returns

After making all the appropriate daddy squeals about her walking, he asked for some photos taken on Easter morning of her and her brother standing beside their Easter baskets

I had to smile at his mention of Easter. I can still recall with perfect clarity our first Easter together.

In my family, everyone got an Easter basket every year, regardless of age and even if they didn't really want one, like my dad.

The Easter Bunny, that visited the house I grew up in, never differentiated between people on the basis of age. if you were in the house, you got an Easter basket - period.

I can still recall some of the bewildering and unexpected gifts the giant rabbit left for my father, much to my mom's innocent amusement.

Our first Easter together, I spent many days filling my stepdaughter's Easter basket with cute trinkets and treats and also delighted in making one for my new husband as well.

The evening before Easter, my husband surprised me by coming home early and got a glimpse of his basket.

I still remember his look of wide-eyed confusion and panic as he asked me if I also expected an Easter basket.

I responded quite calmly in the affirmative.

I knew I was getting an Easter Basket, my mother had been hinting at its contents for the past several weeks.

I knew she would give it to me at Easter dinner the next evening.

It's entirely possible that due to complete forgetfulness and not a desire to see my husband squirm, that I neglected to mention I knew my mother had made me a basket and I was not expecting him to make me one.

I remember that he mumbled something about needing some milk at the store, grabbed his daughter from where she had been helping me and made a rapid exit.

I still get a guilty chuckle in knowing what they went through that evening. My stepdaughter recounted it for me in perfect clarity over the next several years, and we had

several hidden laughs over it.

I knew that finding an Easter basket and any sort of Easter candy or gifts at all at 10 p.m. the Saturday before Easter is almost impossible, as he would soon learn after running through four stores.

I knew this, and still I said nothing. It's a wonder my guilt doesn't continue to haunt me to this day.

Come Easter morning, my young stepdaughter was thrilled to find a trail of jelly beans leading from her bed to her hidden Easter basket.

Note to Easter Bunny: Red jelly beans stain tan carpets if the cat sucks on them and then spits them out the night before.

My husband found where the bunny hid his basket, and then proudly gestured to his daughter to bring something out from our bedroom.

As I mentioned before, the night before Easter, there were no baskets anywhere to be found.

But, as it was almost springtime, there were lots of

buckets.

And, while there was a shortage of Easter candy the night before Easter, there was apparently other candy available at the local grocery store.

I'll never forget the sight of the tin bucket stuffed to the brim with orange and white boxes of Tic-Tics, and my husband's proud moment of proving to me he had not forgotten.

I dutifully exclaimed in delight over the Tic-Tacs, and it took me almost a week before I could stop laughing, although I do continue to share the story with everyone, much to my husband's chagrin.

And when we went to church with my parents that afternoon and then sat down later for Easter dinner, there were enough Tic-Tacs for everyone.

Everyone has different Easter memories.

I will always remember that my daughter started walking the week before Easter.

That memory will be filed with a host of other remembrances to be brought out and lingered on in years to come.

But to me, Easter will always be equated with Tic-Tacs.

To this day, my husband still tries to get me orange and white Tics-Tacs for Easter out of a sense of tradition.

But there are no Tic-Tacs available in Iraq.

So this is another holiday tradition that will be put off for another year until my husband comes back.

And I know that next year, I can expect the triumphant return of the Easter Bunny's Tic-Tacs.

Tiffany Horvath is the

mother of two and the

stepmother of one. Her

husband, Drew, is deployed

to Iraq. She writes every

Sunday abut life at home for

the wife of a deployed soldier.