A Memory of Easter
I remember as a child out in the Flint hills of Kansas during the thirties we colored eggs for Easter. We had to think ahead to that special day because we didn’t have commercial egg coloring back then. My folks raised chickens and kept a few laying hens just for our own eggs. So we would save eggs for Mother to hard-boil and then we would color them in rainbow hues to be hid on the prairie on Easter morning. Mother’s White Rock hens laid white eggs that were best for coloring.
Mother relied on Mother Nature a lot to obtain colors for our eggs by saving juice from cooked beets to make various shades of pink and red colored eggs. Yellow onion skins were steeped in hot water to produce a gorgeous yellow shade and the longer the egg remained in the colored water the darker it would get. Wild elderberries provided a juice that was a deep purple and a wet green leaf wrapped around an egg would leave a beautiful imprint on the egg. Mother used commercial blueing in her rinse water to whiten the laundry and we used some of it to make lovely blue tinted eggs.
We also used wax from candles to make designs on the eggs before immersion in the liquid dye. I believe Mother also added vinegar to the natural juices but that might have been later when the little dye tablets came out in stores. We hid and hunted the eggs as a game, with no mention of the Easter Rabbit that is so talked about today. Anyone who has raised rabbits know they don’t lay eggs of any type. To the children of mid-thirties the art of coloring eggs was just another sign of Spring in our community.
We also just hid them one time and then made egg salad sandwiches, deviled eggs and put them into potato salad and had a picnic.
Audio recorded on 10/17/06 using Skype and Skylook - (Gail was on an analog phone).