Buying And Selling Easter Traditions And Candy, As I Try To Fix This Holiday
I wrote this blog early in my tenure as a part-timer at Barstool and figured it would be the perfect way to slap some content on the site now that I do this for a living. Hopefully this gets some of you through a few minutes of Easter Mass.
Baseball, The Masters, and warm weather are quickly approaching, which means it is Easter time. Despite being the most important holiday of the Catholic religion, Easter gets blown out of the water by Christmas (as well as other non-religious holidays). So I have taken it upon myself to see which Easter traditions are good and bad, and how we can improve this holiday.
The Easter Bunny = Hard Sell. I honestly don’t understand how the Easter Bunny got started and how he still exists. It is one thing to trick your kids into believing a jolly fat guy can fly around the world with reindeer in the name of being nice and giving is better than receiving. But a giant, mutated bunny going around leaving eggs and candy? I am legitimately embarrassed that I ever believed in the Easter Bunny.
Easter Egg Hunts = Buy. Which takes us to the Easter egg hunt. A competitive annual Hunger Games that you had every year with your siblings. I love everything about the Easter egg hunt. The rush you would catching a glimmer of an egg’s pastel color was intoxicating and could/should be monetized by capitalizing on adults who want to feel that rush again. And don’t tell me about those new age scavenger hunts that shitty hipsters do. That doesn’t bring the same heat of an Easter egg hunt. Whoever can think of the solution will definitely get a ton of funding on Shark Tank. But anyway, Easter egg hunts are awesome. And if you disagree, you suck.
PS- If you cheated at the Easter egg hunt, you can never complain about an athlete using a PED to his/her advantage. Cheating in an Easter Egg hunt is so much more corrupt.
Coloring Eggs = Buy (But Only If You Use PAAS. Sell if you use that store brand coloring bullshit). Just look at that crew above having a great old time. When do you see a bunch of animals working as a team like that? Even the egg looks like he is enjoying his time in a bath full of vinegar and water. And that’s because PAAS is the best at what they do. That little tablet could color about 200 eggs no questions asked. And you wouldn’t even mind that vomit-inducing smell of vinegar because there was a chance you were going to make the best looking egg of all-time (which never, EVER happened). And I can only imagine how many shirts/families were ruined by permanent pastel vinegar spilling all over the place. Giving a young kid a small wire dipper to get an egg out of dye that cannot be removed from skin or fabric has disaster written all over it.
However, the biggest flaw of this whole equation was writing on the eggs. The white crayon was a decent solution, but never quite came out the way you wanted it to. And the stickers never stuck the right way and the cardboard cut outs were cheap. Actually, maybe PAAS sucked at what they did. But since believing that would nullify everything I believe during my entire childhood, I will instead move along to the next topic.
Easter Baskets = Buy. Basically a suped up Christmas stocking which acts as most of your gifts for the holiday, which was always fine with me. Easter was always more about the candy and the egg hunt anyway. Christmas was the crown jewel holiday and Easter was the “nice to have” holiday. And both were always better than any of the holidays your Jewish friends had. As long as my Easter basket had baseball cards in it, I was happy. In fact, if you didn’t get baseball cards in your Easter basket, your parents failed you fundamentally as a caregiver.
And you weren’t a truly spoiled kid unless you wrote a letter to the Easter Bunny like you did to Santa Claus at least one time, trying to press your luck and get some sort of big gift for Easter. And if your parents were rich and actually bought you those big gifts, I hated you and your entire family.
Fake Easter Grass = Hard Sell. This idiotic, comically fake grass is a nuisance to everyone involved. Parents probably don’t like cleaning it up, and kids hate digging through it to get their gifts/candy. It’s almost worse than tinsel (key word is almost. Tinsel is the devil). I don’t know what else you could use to line your Easter baskets, but literally anything in the world (again, other than fucking tinsel) would be a better choice.
Peeps = The Hardest Of Sells. Peeps are to Easter what egg nog is to Christmas. Some people (read: weirdos) are die hards and love the stuff. And the vast majority rightfully look down on these freaks. But make no mistake about it; Egg nog is Peeps. Peeps are egg nog. They are the Finkle and Einhorn of holiday foods. They need to be killed once and for all. And that Peeps egg nog sludge that was released earlier this year? Ship it to the African country that will be receiving the Kentucky Wildcats 40-0 shirts.
Cadbury Creme Eggs = Soft Sell. Growing up, I thought that the Cadbury Creme Egg was the king of the Easter basket. And it probably was. The wrapper was just a thing of beauty and having a chocolate egg with fake yolk inside looked awesome. Add in those timeless commercials, and Cadbury should still be the king of the Easter game (even though they don’t 100% make sense and they throw your eyes for a loop because they are clearly not in HD).
But just like everything else in life, things start sucking as you get older. I don’t know if they actually changed the recipe or what, but the creme of the egg doesn’t seem to be as creamy, if that makes sense. Instead today’s eggs have a grainier sugar texture. Back in the day the Cadbury Egg yolk had the consistency of a real yolk. Today, not so much (And I admit that there is a very good chance that they changed nothing. But in my young, stupid kid brain, the Cadbury yolk was identical to a real yolk). And the news that they are changing the chocolate in the egg was the death blow. May the king rest in peace.
Cadbury Mini Eggs = HARD Buy. When push comes to shove, Cadbury Mini Eggs are the best candy of Easter. And while I realize this is a bold statement, I am going to say it anyway. And I am going to write it in bold and italics to let it be known. Cadbury Mini Eggs are the best holiday-specific food in the world. Better than anything on this list. Better than candy canes. Shit, they are even better than Santa Coke. Yeah, I just went there.
Finally, the weirdest part about all this Cadbury madness is how the company absolutely OWNS Easter, yet just fades to the background of the chocolate game in America the other 364 days of the year. They need a new CEO worse than the Mets and Knicks combined.
Whoppers Robin Eggs = Sell. Sell. Sell. Sell. Selllllllllll. Just the absolute pits. Lets get this right out in the open now. Malt balls are the worst. Weird texture inside, lacks any real substance, and oh yeah the flavor sucks too. And to make matters worse, they kind of resemble the Cadbury Mini Eggs to the untrained eye. I can’t tell you how many times I thought I was biting into a Cadbury Mini Egg and I bit into one of these pieces of shit. F-minus grade every time out.
Chocolate Bunny = Buy*. The chocolate bunny is great because you can get a bunch of snacking sessions out of it. And if you don’t talk to the bunny about how you are going to eat his ears and do the “no no no, please don’t eat my ears” in a high bunny voice routine, YOU are the weirdo. Those are just Easter rules.
Anyway, I stick the asterisk there because that statement holds true when you get a solid chocolate bunny. Those things are A-OK with me. But the hollow bunny is such a goddamn tease. It is the Trojan horse of Easter candy. You invite it into your life expecting one thing, and then something much worse comes out of it’s hollow belly/soul. Sure your entire village doesn’t get murdered. But the letdown of realizing that your bunny is 90% less chocolate than you expected is basically just as heartbreaking.
Reese’s Eggs = Hard Buy (Duh). Like most candies, Reeses just takes their candy and molds it in the shape of an egg for easter. But there seems to be more peanut butter per square inch in these glorious little treats. Reese’s is so clearly the king of the chocolate game it’s scary. Reese’s is more clearly the at the top of their industry than MJ was to basketball, Babe Ruth was to baseball, Wayne Gretzky was to hockey, and Super Bowl Eli Manning is to football.
Jellybeans = It’s Complicated. This is a tough subject because the jellybean is probably the food most synonymous with Easter. And if we are being honest, the name jellybean is awesome. Jelly in a bean. Great stuff. Okay, I’m rambling. Anyway, this day and age there are roughly 85 different flavor of jellybeans. Brands like Swedish Fish (decent), Nerds (incredible), and Jolly Ranchers (meh) have gotten into the game. But for this blog, I will give my opinion on the three big names.
Generic Jellybeans = HARD Sell. These random jellybeans from the store don’t really have flavors associated with them. The orange usually tastes like orange, red may taste good, and then it gets weird. Purple sometimes will have a perfume taste but sometimes will be awesome. And green is more of a wild card than Charlie Kelly.
And then we get to the black jellybean. The black jellybean is, well, the black sheep of the enormous jellybean family. Black jellybeans taste like black licorice. Black licorice sucks. Ipso facto, black jellybeans suck. If you know someone that will eat your black jellybeans without you having to get up and throw them in the garbage, consider yourself lucky. But also realize that person cannot be trusted under any circumstances. And he or she probably eats their own boogers.
Jelly Belly Jellybeans = Sell. Jelly Belly fans are bougie as fuck. They think that their jellybean is a better quality because it is more expensive and comes in a fancy box. And yes, they are good when you are in the mood to taste an accurate reproduction of a real flavor in jellybean form. But the butter popcorn flavor sucks. The coffee flavor sucks. The cinnamon flavor sucks.
And even after saying all that, I can’t front. Mixing the flavors based on the recipes in the box to make another flavor was real cool (even though some of the flavors on their own, again, flat out SUCK). So while Jelly Belly tries to be a fancy candy, they are also sold by the bushel at Marshall’s. Which makes them pretty much a fugazi fancy candy. Fuck you Jelly Belly.
Starburst Jellybeans = Hard Buy. These jellybeans may be the best/most addictive fruit candy out there (1A to Sour Patch Watermelons at 1B). Almost every fruit comes off perfectly and stays true to the original Starburst flavor. There are two flavors however that are in Starburst Jellybeans but not in Starburst Original Fruit Chews. One is grape (or in this case purple. Because when it comes to candy, juices, or ice pops, grape should always be called purple). Starburst pulls it off perfectly and it complements all the other flavors. But my only problem is with green apple. It simply shouldn’t be there. I have made this statement before and I will make it again. Green apple and blue raspberry flavors are for sheep. They are not good on their own. Some marketing suit in the 90s tricked you into thinking they were good. Look at what green apple did to Skittles. The original red bag Skittles are awful now because the green apple just overpowers the entire bag. But despite all that, this green apple doesn’t overpower the flavor when you throw multiple jellybeans in your mouth. In fact, eating 3+ Starburst jellybeans at a time is the way to eat them. Starburst jellybeans. Simply the best.
On A Sunday = Sell. I am fundamentally against having a holiday on Sunday simply because it means that you cannot get a day off from work for the holiday. If Columbus Day or President’s Day was on a Sunday, people would not have nearly the love for them as they do now. As a card-carrying member of the Catholic religion (not really, we don’t have cards. Do we?), I admit that I have been jealous of when my Jewish co-workers were able to leave work early on a Friday or not show up at all because of the way their holiday schedule fell. Now some people have off on Good Friday, but most people still don’t. So we need the Catholic Church to rig up something to incorporate Easter Monday. Maybe say that they moved the rock back in front of the Jesus’ tomb that Monday and all Catholics should rest. This makes years when Opening Day falls on the Monday after Easter that much better.
Also, would it kill the Catholic Church to make the holiday the same Sunday every year? It’s the 21st century. Can’t we tweak a few things for the greater good of our people so we don’t have to Google what day Easter is every single year? Maybe have The Masters final round and a couple of surefire good NBA games take place on Easter Sunday, kill Opening Night on Sunday (because that has been the stupidest idea for way too long now), and have Easter Monday and Opening Day around baseball on one glorious day. Christmas has become a great sports day, why not do the same with Easter? And since we have a cool Pope, this could actually happen.
Boom, Easter fixed in less than 2500 words. Enjoy all the candy and baseball cards you receive today. Happy Easter ya filthy animals!