This column is from my humor book, Musings on Minutiae. If you’d like to read more, head to Amazon.com to pick up the paperback ($10) or grab it for your Kindle ($0.99)!

Easter was always an interesting time in my household. I use the word “interesting” to put a positive spin on the situation when deep down inside I wanted to write adjectives like “absurd,” “frustrating,” and “emotionally scarring.”
You see, in my home, Easter was serious business, especially when it came to the traditional dyeing of hard-boiled eggs. For whatever reason, my father always became very militant during this holiday in what I assumed was an attempt to create the same “interesting” experience that he grew up with. It was the one holiday where he could really take charge and play dictator to our family.

The first order issued to my mother, my sister and me was to scour the earth and bring back eggs from the supermarket. Shortly thereafter, the kitchen became an assembly line of boiling ridiculous numbers of eggs and prepping them for what was to come. The second order of business was that we locate the correct egg dye for the big event. It couldn’t be any ordinary egg dye. It had to be the coloring that came in tiny Victorian looking glass bottles and had a plastic rabbit’s head for a stopper. According to him, all other dyes were sub-par and thoroughly un-American.

As the eggs finished boiling, my father would bring out a gigantic bowl reserved only for this particular day and event and would spend the next half an hour meticulously adding just the right amount of dye to the bowl of water. One by one, drops of red, green, yellow, and blue splashed into the bowl with surgical precision. He didn’t believe in solid color eggs, so this preparation would provide us with multiple shades which would stain the shells with a second rate tie-dye effect. As he stooped over the basin, his eyes wide, he looked something like a mad scientist in a flannel shirt, his untamed chest hair spilling over the collar.

From there, the rest of us mere humans were to form a circle around the bowl and were given a specific tool which we would use to move the hard-boiled eggs from the table, into the bowl, and back out again. It wasn’t a spoon, or a ladle, or any other tool of practicality. Instead, it was one of those wire contraptions that was bent all kinds of ways to cradle an egg, though it was so flimsy that it could barely support the weight. Egg dyeing isn’t the most complex of processes and one would think that just dipping an egg into the dye would be enough. The Commander General, my father, would consider this a false statement. According to him we were to place the egg gently onto the dipping wire and enter it into the dye while moving our arms in a clockwise motion at a specific velocity that he had predetermined by calculating the time of day, multiplied by the speed of the earth’s rotation, divided by the current alignment of the planets. It was an intense mathematical formula that he never shared with anyone.

After the egg dyeing orientation had ended, my family members would line up and take turns dyeing the eggs while my father closely supervised the entire process. When it was my turn, I would put the egg into the apparatus and slowly begin to lower it towards the bowl of colored water. Nine times out of ten my father would tell me to stop before the egg even broke the surface, and I would receive a lecture on how wrongly I was approaching the dyeing process. He would then throw around accusations that my family wasn’t taking it seriously enough. If my second attempt to dye the egg still wasn’t up to his standards, he would take it from me and do it himself. I was then sent to the back of the line.

With all the guidelines written out in the Easter egg dyeing policies and procedures manual, there was one rule that we weren’t to break under any circumstances: Once the egg had entered the dye, we were not to lose control and drop it to the bottom of the bowl. For if the egg were accidentally separated from its transport device, then we would end up with an unacceptable drab gray Easter egg that would ruin the spirit of the holiday. Furthermore, whoever accidentally created one of these embarrassing abominations, had to be the one to eat it.

Each year, this exhaustive process ended one of two ways. Either we dyed all the eggs and kept our sanity, or one by one we boycotted his madness and left to do other things until my father was left in the room to finish dyeing the eggs alone. Which, in retrospect, was probably what he wanted all along.

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