Happy Easter to me.

When I was about eight or nine years old, Easter was one of my favorite holidays. My mom always bought me a small toy or gift that was buried in with my candy. A couple years prior to this, my favorite present ever was a pair of slip-on canvas shoes with a blue and pink flower print on them. I'm not joking.

Anyway, ninth Easter. My brother preferred to grow up more quickly when it came to holidays than I did. This was mainly due to the fact that my mom always said when we stopped believing in the Easter bunny or Santa Clause or the tooth fairy, we stopped receiving gifts. I wasn't stupid. My brother, on the other hand, apparently needed more time to process this threat. He was about six this Easter and took to informing me at every possible moment that the Easter bunny did not exist. This usually resulted in minutes of me covering my ears and shouting, "I can't hear you. La la la la la," and he yelling that I was stupid. Outside of this instance, and maybe car rides, we got along fairly well growing up.

My dad went out to get the paper after we found the hard boiled eggs my brother and I refused to eat. A few moments later my dad came back in and told us that my brother and I should take on more responsibility and get the paper for them. You can imagine how well this went over with our baskets of candy already comfortably placed in our laps. But we were weak children and put up very little argument. My dad sat down on the couch waiting for the paper and my brother and I, much slower than usual, put on our shoes and coats.

By this time, I'd worn my brother down and was beginning to convince him that Mom and Dad could not have possibly hid the eggs and filled the baskets. We got to the end of our long driveway and my brother bent over to pick up the newspaper. I froze. Maybe he wouldn't see what was in the road. I looked at my brother, then the road, then back at my brother just in time to see him stand up slowly, eyeing what I saw. My brother hugged the newspaper as we cautiously approached it. Lying in the middle of the road was a large dead rabbit. I cringed, my brother gasped. We ran back to the house where my dad sat rolling on the couch. My brother threw the newspaper to the floor and screamed, "There is no Easter bunny!" He grabbed his basket and went to play in his room. I stood furious at my dad, "You ruined every holiday for me." I meant to follow that up with a promising threat, but my dad was laughing so hard that when he finally was able to speak, he interrupted me only to ask if I saw any surprises getting the paper.