Easter Bunny. Perfectly Normal.

RAH RAH RAH Easter!

With Easter coming to a close, I like to reflect on the sweet gullibility, er I mean innocence, of young children. Evidence: Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Elf on the Shelf. This year, we even had a leprechaun visit for St. Patrick’s Day. What with the Tooth Fairy visiting a couple of times a year, we seem to have mythological creatures in and out of the house all the time. But not monsters. Sure, there’s this Fairy out there who for some unknown reason wants to trade money for your teeth. She has free and easy access to your bedroom to come and go as she pleases. Perfectly normal. But Monsters? Monsters aren’t coming in your room. There’s no such thing as monsters - Go to bed!

Chiara, for her part, is too smart not to have figured out all this mythological baloney, I think. But, she plays along since there is money, chocolate and presents involved. If not, it’s reaching the point where I have to question her intelligence. Just look at some of these logical loopholes that should have raised a question or two:

Whenever Santa’s workshop is depicted in a movie or TV show, the elves are working away, merrily building by hand well crafted, wooden toys. In other words, the kind of toys no self-respecting child in 2014 would be caught dead near. What shows up on Christmas day are packaged, branded toys, most of which look like they came out the action end of an injection molding machine. So what gives? Does Santa own the injection molding machines and the packaging lines? Do the elves painstakingly re-create the toys and packaging that they could buy in the store? Why go to that kind of effort? I can just see Jingle the Elf hand-painting the Play-Doh logo on a box to mimic the one at Toys-R-Us. Or does Santa just go to the store? In that case, why are there so many elves building the wooden junk? Have they lost their jobs like so many American factory workers?

Whatever Santa’s illogicalities, it’s nothing compared to the Easter Bunny. Easter night, a bunny hides eggs and puts chocolates in a basket. Now that doesn’t make one darn bit of sense at all. Bunny. Eggs. See what I’m getting at here?

And at least when you see Santa at the mall, it’s a man. Or a Jolly Old Elf. But anyway something that looks reasonably like the thing he is pretending to be. A mall Easter Bunny is a 6-foot-tall college football mascot. He looks nothing like a real rabbit. No one is fooled. “It’s a man in a suit” says my daughter. So who comes Easter night? The mascot or a real-ish bunny?

Today’s Easter Bunny has to be technically savvy to boot. Some of these Leap Pad games don’t even come in cartridge form, so they have to be downloaded directly from the internet. So this rabbit has to sit up late at night making the crummy Leap Pad download application work. Then he has to put the child’s same old Leap Pad in the basket with a note explaining there is a new game on it. Do you know how hard all that is when all you have is paws, floppy ears and a wiggly nose to work with?

On a side note, the person who really raises my Easter ire is Curious George and his egg dyeing ways. Never have the wits of man conceived an activity so well suited to staining clothes than dyeing Easter eggs. A tiny wire dipper carefully lowers an Easter egg into a vat of dye. That’s the theory - a 4-year-old doing this more than once is just tempting fate. But Curious George was curious, so he dipped his eggs in two different colors to see what would happen – you know, yellow and blue make green. So now we have to dip our eggs in two colors, too. Darn you Curious George! Why do you have to be so gosh-darned curious? Can’t you just be curious what it’s like to dip one egg in one color? Can’t you just put a lid on your curiosity, George? Can’t you just get your act together, CURIOUS GEORGE!?!?!?