HAPPY EASTER

This is the day the Easter Bunny buddies up with Santa Claus to deliver baskets of colored eggs and chocolate bunnies to little children.  One memory remains scorched onto my little girl brain all these years.  I was about 8 years old, and there was snow on the ground Easter morning.  A rabbit must've run across our lawn and left his paw prints in the snow.  My brother easily convinced me that they were the Easter Bunny's tracks.  OMG, back then, that was bigger than the resurrection!

The first mention of the Easter Bunny delivering candy and eggs originated in Germany back in the 1500s.  The Pennsylvania Dutch settlers brought the bunny tradition to America in the 1700s. 

Easter vies with Halloween for the most candy sales each year.  I bought four chocolate covered rice krispie bunnies, one to sit beside each dinner plate.  Also bought yellow chick Peeps to top our angel food cherry dessert.  Will add a nest of Cool Whip for the chick to sit on...gotta hold onto the little kid that still lives in all of us.  Speaking of Peeps, the Just Born Factory in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, makes enough Peeps in one year to circle Earth twice.  Yellow Peeps come in first as favorites, with pink second-favorite.

Easter wouldn't be Easter without Cadbury Creme Eggs.  The Bournville factory in Birmingham, England, cranks out 500 million of the cream-filled eggs every year.  Piled on top of each other, they'd create a tower taller than Mount Everest.

Then there's the traditional Jelly Beans.  More than 16 billion of 'em are made for Easter each year.  It takes about 2 weeks to make a Jelly Bean.  Yup.

Around 90 million chocolate bunnies are sold in the U.S. for Easter.  Some are hollow, some are marshmallow filled.  There's the big question:  do you eat the bunny's ears first?  59% of people do.

There was a time that pretzels were associated with Easter.  The salty twisted pretzel resembled arms crossing in prayer.  Legend has it that back in the Middle Ages monks baked pretzels to give as rewards to students who did well in their lessons.....arms crossed with hands on opposite shoulders.  Some say the three holes in the pretzel represent the Trinity.