It’s a meaningful time of year. A time of Easter, a time of the spring equinox and the spring solstice. A time for thoughtful reflection and refreshing renewal. And, of course, a time for a deeply secular commitment to the love of chocolate.
It all starts when you are just a kid. I blame it on the Easter Bunny.
Early on, I developed a springtime addiction to hollow chocolate bunnies that I found every Easter morning.
There’s just something about the taste and texture of that once-a-year bunny – breaking off pieces (going for the ears first of course), and reveling in about three thousand calories of pure chocolate bunnyness.
One year the Easter Bunny (not to be confused with the Hollow Chocolate Bunny) made a huge mistake and brought me a Solid Chocolate Bunny. It just wasn’t the same as the classic hollow rabbit and I was a bit depressed for over week. And I was about 35 years old that fateful year.
This year was unusual too, but I handled it quite well, I thought.
I got a monkey. I’m not sure why, or what that has to say about what the Easter Bunny thinks of me these days, but the main thing is – it was made of chocolate, and it was hollow.
It remains one of the few hollow chocolate monkeys I’ve ever seen. And right now, a disconcerting sight: half a Hollow Chocolate Monkey sits on my desk, his head missing. I’m trying to make him last, spread the calories out over a week or two. But of course, it’s not working. We are, after all, talking about chocolate.
But it turns out that biting the ears off of a chocolate bunny, or the head off a chocolate monkey may be a good thing after all.
Just last week European nutrition researchers published the results of a ten year study that actually showed that “a small amount of chocolate daily may help the heart and lower blood pressure.” Sure, that small amount is one small square and they hasten to add that it’s too early to make recommendations. But that’s close enough for me.
And nobody needs to justify massive chocolate consumption to the Cadbury chocolate people in Toronto. It supplies all the company’s Easter treats for all of North America. And get this — that plant churns out one billion (yes, billion) mini eggs and 200 million crème and caramel-filled eggs every year.
There is no truth to the rumour that the plant is owned by a North American consortium of dentists.
A billion chocolate mini eggs every year, eh? When I really think about it, I guess I’m not surprised, since we have about half of them in our house.
Every Easter our family room is covered in those tasty little foil-wrapped chocolate comestibles. The brightly colored eggs are everywhere — behind books and couch pillows, on top of pictures, under lamps and decorations, in the most obvious and in the most creatively unlikely places. On the coffee table, in the dog’s dish (nestled in the dry dogfood), inside cabinets and inside shoes (ewwww!).
We have hidden chocolate Easter eggs turning up till Christmas.
Sometime in October someone will be watching TV and suddenly spot one that we all missed, making a bee-line to grab it before anyone else does. And when guests are over, I’ll glance over as they stroll in from the living room happily munching on something, a shiny foil wrapper crunched between their fingertips.
I look at it as the Easter Bunny’s little way of contributing to the health and well-being of the lucky chocolate-loving visitors and family members who have the impressive talent of sniffing out chocolate even when it’s wrapped in foil.
But all this talk chocolate is getting to me.
I have a headless monkey staring at me right now, and I have a feeling the rest of him isn’t going to last much longer. And after that, I’m going egg hunting. Again.
Harley Hay is a local filmmaker and freelance writer.