British kids apparently eat over five pounds of candy each over Easter weekend — but mass tooth decay is only a minor reason to hate this disappointing holiday.
“Families with two adults in their 40s and two children under 14 could have an amazing cumulative total of 30 Easter eggs in the household over the holiday,” market research director Julian Chamberlain told UPI.com. And even more shockingly, “Seventy-seven percent of adults allow their children to tuck into their Easter egg binge first thing on Easter morning — before having any breakfast or even a drink.” Sound the alarms! Seriously, I couldn’t care less about British kids having candy for breakfast. Here’s why I’m an Easter Grinch:
Easter is confusing.
If you grow up Christian, you have a religious narrative for Easter. But if, like me, your family got its religion from Dr. Who, then Easter is totally fucking confusing. A giant rabbit hides eggs in your house or yard, then you hunt for them and when you find them you have … an egg. Maybe he hides fake eggs with like jelly beans inside because who wants a hardboiled egg that’s been buried in a ficus anyway? Maybe he also brings you a basket with marshmallow Peeps and little weird likenesses of himself made out of chocolate, which you then eat. What? This holiday is so thematically disunified that although I vividly remember my loss of faith in Santa and the Tooth Fairy, I think the Easter Bunny just sort of slid from Real to Bullshit in my mind without me even noticing. Maybe he was always Bullshit. The Easter Bunny sucks.
An egg will rot in your house.
If you use actual hard-boiled eggs, that is. You definitely will not find all of them, because your bleary-eyed parents were trying to stick them all behind the TV table or whatever before you woke up, and they won’t really remember where they hid them, and even if they do, one of them will probably slide behind the fridge and rot there, making May smell horrible. Even if you are an adult, and you just dyed some eggs with your friends because you thought it would be funny and nostalgic, you will forget about them somewhere and they will rot. Because Easter eggs, once dyed, are one of the most terrible categories of object: they’re useless, but you feel sort of bad throwing them away. This kind of object is made to stink up your life.
The candy sucks.
Have you ever had a Peep? I mean actually put it in your mouth, not in the microwave to watch it swell to five times its normal size? What about a waxy-tasting milk chocolate bunny, with that weird body cavity where its milk chocolate bunny organs were? Halloween knows how to do candy — it should teach Easter.
It pains me to say all this, because I do like dyeing eggs — except for the part about cleaning up all the stained newspapers and little cups of dye and vinegar. And throwing away the rotten ones around Cinco de Mayo. Like so many things, Easter is probably best if you’re kind of a spoiled kid and have someone doing everything for you. Including buying you a bunch of Reese’s so you don’t have to eat disgusting Peeps.
Survey: Kids Eat 5.5 Lbs Of Easter Candy [UPI.com]