Easter, the day a rabbit rules the world, and his second in command is the baby chick.

I wasn’t raised with much religion, I chose for a while to go to Sunday school but I treated it more like Girl Scouts and quit when confirmation came around. I loved the arts and crafts and didn’t mind the singing and memorization of verses. Frankly I don’t remember reading any thing right from the Bible, we got the phrase on a little slip of paper and took it home to memorize, and then we had to read them the following week. If we did it right we got a treat (candy or baked goods). I understood that Christmas was all about baby Jesus, and we always did the same play about his birth, the message wasn’t subtle. Yet, somehow I missed the Easter memo, I know they must have done the same push in spring, but for the life of me I don’t remember a single special thing we did in Sunday school for Easter. Maybe I blocked it from my mind so as not to tarnish my bunny-fest holiday? Honestly, my only real “church” memory connected with Easter is those crosses being put up in the yard of the church and hanging a big purple cloth on one.

Bottom line, Easter has always been my favorite holiday after Halloween for one reason, rabbits. They are everywhere, and on everything and you can’t escape them. Easter also always meant arts and crafts for me, colored eggs, and paper decorations were made at home. I would plot for weeks before, pick just right kind of egg color kit I wanted, I always wanted the one with the most colors and I recall mostly getting Dudley’s. I would want to get three dozen eggs, and my we would bargain a bit and usually end up with 18-24 if I was lucky. I just wanted to color eggs all day. I loved it. I especially loved drawing on them with white crayon and then trying to do at least 2 colors. Even my parents would draw on the eggs with the white crayon and then see if they managed to make something that looked at all like a flower, bunny or maybe a face.

Thing is I don’t really like hard-boiled eggs unless they are in one of two forms, potato salad or deviled eggs. So Easter also reminds me of potato salad because the day after Easter my mom would make a huge bowl of potato salad and it would have specs of blue, red, purple, pink and orange, as there was always a little dye that got through the shell.

I always got a basket, and it always had a rabbit toy or plush rabbit. By far the best year was the year I got my first real rabbit. He was white, very small and super cute. I actually got him a couple days after Easter, I think there might have been a talk about how serious it was to get a pet, it wasn’t a stuffed animal etc…but if I really wanted one I could. We went to the pet store a couple days later and I picked him out, my god that was awesome, walking up and down the row of bunnies, I have no idea how I managed to pick just one. On the way home I sat in the back of our Toyota wagon and watched him jump over my legs while I tried to catch him. I don’t recall picking his name, or debating, or even coming up with a runner up, I just know I named him Sniffles (yes, Sniffles, I was 6, cut me some slack).

Of course like every other Easter basket mine also had candy. I would get some chocolate, but not a lot since I actually didn’t eat all that much of it. I got what my family called “chocolate footballs”, I think I was in Junior High when I realized they were “chocolate eggs” and that my family had probably made what was once a joke into a common household name that child doesn’t know is wrong. I would also get jelly beans, but most of those my mom and dad ate because I don’t really like jellybeans. Finally, I would have a small chocolate rabbit (3-4”) and a couple white chocolate “chickies on sticks” or at least that it what I called them and the center piece of Easter candy, the large solid milk chocolate rabbit (8-12”) and all of these were always from Fannie Mae.

After the first initial day of gnawing on the giant rabbit he would be put back into his box. Then every morning while making my lunch my mom would cut off a chunk and put into a zip-lock baggie for my lunch. This lasted for a bout a week before it was gone.

As you can imagine I get a lot of rabbit gifts, and by and large I love them. It is hard for me to turn down a cute rabbit. Therefore, Easter is an absolute bonanza for me. With the advent of the Internet, email and QuickTime I also get every piece of spam related to rabbits and Easter. Granted a lot of these are really funny, but I also started to realize that there was more than one, so, here is my Easter greeting to you…the many and varied chocolate rabbits.

This was the first one I saw and I thought it might be the "original", but apparently it might have been the PG-13 version (see below).






































And here we have the UK version.















I guess the Democrats needed their own?
















These seem to be furry or covered with boils.





















Hilarious right? Sure, if you are 11 and it is 1984.














I like the perspective here, and the view through the space that one ear occupied in the foreground.











The "alt comic" version, it might be what Emily the Strange gets in her basket.











This one is not that funny, and is sort of Farside-esque but still fits in this group.








These final two actually aren't chocolate bunnies but I'm posting them anyways. Happy Easter!



















This one doesn't make much sense, and I'm not sure where it came from. It seems to harsh to have been created by a Christian. But it does seem to have a "Christian thing" going on, like it could be a commentary on the commercial non-Christian Easter, how we forget that it isn't about bunnies but is about Jesus.




















I have no idea what is going on with this, I've been sent this one more than once but I laugh everytime.