Every year when my April trip to Mexico coincides with Easter, we have an Easter egg hunt for Alejandro's nephew Ezra. The whole idea of the Easter Bunny and Easter eggs is something quite foreign to Mexico where the holiday is strictly a religious observance. However, some of the "gringo" customs seem to be seeping into the country. Alejandro said that this year he saw bags of plastic Easter eggs at Walmart.
Alejandro told me not to bring so much candy, so this year I only bought one small bag of wrapped chocolates to put in the eggs. For the rest of the eggs, I went through the collection of foreign coins that have accumulated from my travels and chose a variety of Euro coins, British pence, Norwegian krona, Swiss francs, and even a few U.S. coins and some out-of-date Mexican pesos. On Saturday I filled the eggs and late that evening I hid the eggs.
After a late breakfast on Easter morning, Ezra came downstairs to look for the eggs. I had bought a pair of bunny ears for him to wear. I thought that perhaps he would find that too childish (after all, he is now 12 years old), but he put them on without hesitation. There were 48 hidden eggs, and as in years past, even I had forgotten where some of them were.
(As I have mentioned before, Mexican parents generally do not like photos of their children to be posted on the internet. Although I have never discussed this with Ezra's mom, I make it a point never to post photos which clearly show his entire face.)
The eggs were collected in a couple of cute baskets that I purchased in Ohio.
After we found 45 of the eggs, Alejandro joined in the search and found the final three eggs.
Afterwards, Ezra and I sat down and opened the eggs. We separated the ones with candy from the ones with coins. He carefully sorted the coins by country.
We will see if next year, when (gasp!) Ezra has become a teenager, whether he still wants to have an Easter egg hunt.
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