Matching dresses, hidden candy

Since it's Easter, here are a few of my favorite Easter-related childhood memories:

1. Mom always made matching Easter dresses (typically the same design in different pastel shades) for my older sister, Shanna, and me...and sometimes she also made herself something that coordinated with what we were wearing.
2. Of course, we were so adorable that we also got our pictures taken in our beautiful new dresses, which typically involved Shanna (who didn't like pictures or cooperation) crossing her arms, crying, and not looking at the camera, and me next to her smiling as though nothing is wrong. It's funny, but I think I like these old pictures more now because of Shanna's scowling...it could get a little dull if we were both just smiley and sweet in all of them.
3. Our grandma also got us stuffed Easter bunnies each year, which we loved. They were typically adorable and fluffy, and like our dresses, a matching pair in different spring colors.
4. Mom also hid Easter eggs for us every year, either outside if the weather was nice or throughout the house if it was rainy or cold. It varied whether she chose to stuff plastic eggs or hide little chocolate ones...the plastic ones were important for outdoor hunts, though. What I remember about the process of Easter egg hunting is that it sucks to have an older sister involved, because she'll always find more, and then things have to get evened out after all of the eggs have been found. My mom developed some good egg hiding tactics, though, even going so far as to label each egg with an "S" or a "W", so that we could each hunt only for the eggs that belonged to us.
5. I also remember different points in the year when we would just be hanging out and we would stumble upon a lonesome little chocolate egg somewhere in the house that we missed at Easter -- and not necessarily the previous Easter, either. Sometimes we'd find an egg and be like, "Hey, this is the kind Mom hid a couple years ago!" And then, of course, whoever found it would eat it, even if it was a little whitened with age. I kind of wish Mark would hide chocolate all over our apartment so that I could occasionally experience this kind of delicious excitement. I mean, wouldn't it be cool if I went to get a book off the shelf someday and found a candy egg behind it?!
6. I almost forgot this one, and I can't believe it: dyeing hard-boiled eggs. Every year, we'd get the cheap Paas egg coloring kit, which included 6 color pellets (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple) to dissolve fizzily in vinegar and water, a white crayon for repelling the dye and leaving secret messages on the eggs (usually each person in our family would have an egg with their name on it), useless decorative cellophane egg sleeves, stickers, cardboard rabbit and chick character standups, and a wire egg dipper. Mom kept the wire dipper every year, so that we got quite a collection of them after a while and didn't have to share with each other or between colors. We liked seeing just how long we could leave an egg in a color to get it as deeply and brightly colored as possible, and we also really enjoyed making half-half colored eggs with each end dipped in a different color. Once they were colored to our specifications, we would let them dry in the cardboard tray that was formed by punching the circular pieces out of the back of the dye kit box. Once they were dry, we would put the eggs back into the carton that they came from the store in, and I would enjoy egg salad for the next couple of weeks, always preserving my favorite eggs until all the others had been eaten. Shanna was never a big fan of eating eggs, so there wasn't much risk of her swiping mine. :)

And on that note, Happy Easter!