Easter - Don't be left out

OMG! Look at that wagon. Your kids will be the envy:

Christmas is even worse for bad foods, often fueled by the perception that celebration mandatorily includes baking dozens of cookies, maybe cakes, sometimes fruit breads and all sorts of high sugar, refined flour based foods. And look at Halloween - giving fruits is no longer considered advisable because of past contamination by nasty people who put nonfood items in them. So the candy once again dominates as the primary handout.

I'm frequently amazed at the vendors at health expos I go to regularly. Some like the AAA Caregiver Expo are geared toward seniors. So what do the vendors offer besides the ubiquitous pill holders and pill spliters? Candy,lots of it - Hershey's dominates the handouts, Tootsie Rolls are less prevalent but always offered, as well as a variety of hard candies.

I can always tell which booths are offering the best variety of candy because of the crowds at those particular booths.

Never once have I seen anything healthy offered, but I doubt that the vendors want to spend the extra dollars to get healthy organic food as opposed to grocery store produce still stained with white residue from sprays.

Holidays are for manufacturers and commercial entities - they're the ones who benefit, other than what I hope is a growing trend of people who do something for others, such as the Jewish medical people who volunteer for shifts so nonJewish staff can spend holidays with their families, or others who find good deeds to do instead of buying junk food.

But there's also the whole negative effect of putting pressure on lower income families which can't afford to buy anything for their families at holiday time.   The "how much will you spend" attitude creates dilemmas for them.    

Give it time. Just give it time.

My aunt, when she had 4 grand-children, had 800 eggs she would fill with crap! It's all about consumerism...Jesus who?

My funniest Easter was when I was dating a single mom. With her two kids we went to a camping site in some backcountry woods over Easter weekend. She had the idea to color all the eggs pastel green or tan so that they would be harder for the kids to find. Well, they didn't even find a third of them. Me and mom couldn't remember where we hid all the eggs. At least a dozen were unaccounted for when we left. So much for LNT.