I love rabbits. In fact, the rabbit is my primary spirit animal. (I have a few others, but I usually keep those secret. Mostly as a test for those who claim they can know this type of thing.) This time of year just seems to intensify such feelings, seeing so many rabbits everywhere as decorations. Sure, the living animals can be cuter, but I don't get to see them in the wild too often. Then, there are the numerous videos. Watch one short rabbit video on Facebook, and soon the feed is flooded with them for the next week or two. I don't mind it though. Anyway, Easter. This was one of the first holidays that stopped being a childhood tradition with me. Halloween and Christmas would last a lot longer as special, but once I was too old for baskets, the holiday lost something. Things changed in the mid-to-late 90s though. I started to get back into getting marshmallow Peeps and chocolate-covered eggs. This was the height of the regular Peeps, when there were still seven colors. This was just before the flavored marshmallow varieties debuted. A few years later, strawberry- and vanilla-cream eggs showed up, with orange-cream soon after. Then, the flavor boom took over, as regular Peeps were whittled down to just five colors. Now, there are almost a dozen different flavors, especially when exclusives are taken into account. Some flavors even stay around until early summer. This year, I only got one box of the "Sparkling Berry" bunnies and nothing else. Many of favorites are no longer being produced, not even for other holidays. For instance, a few years ago, Peeps had cherry marshmallows with a chocolate drizzle for Valentines Day. They only lasted a few years, but they were great. Peeps didn't even have Valentines Day varieties this year, although both Halloween and Christmas had full line-ups. Then, there are the chocolate-covered marshmallow eggs. About the same time I came back around to Peeps, I started trying the eggs again as well. My favorite brand as a kid (maybe Luden's, I really can't remember after so much time) was no longer to be found anywhere. I used to get boxes of them at a time, and eat my way through them fairly fast. Each wrapper was it one of four colors, but I might be remembering it wrong. I'm still looking for them, or any trace of what happened to them. Anyway, I tried other eggs. These were flavored, beyond just marshmallow. My favorite was eating a strawberry and a banana one together, the eggs split in half and then taken together. For a very short time, there was even a mixed chocolate and vanilla cream egg. It was wonderful, but it was discontinued after just a year or two. Even banana was stopped for a few years, before it returned as a whip filling instead of a cream. Not as easy to mix and match anymore. No one local even carried it this year. I was lucky to get a few on a trip back in February. I will be eating my last one this Easter, another tradition I started back in the 90s. I would eat them in the afternoon while watching a favorite Easter movie, Night of the Lepus. TNT used to show it back when they aired movies that were over twenty years old on a regular basis. Anyway, the plot of this cheesy, B- horror flick is fairly simple. A town was being overrun by a rabbit population boom, threatening their crops. A scientist was brought in to come up with a solution, basically bunny birth control. The scientist's daughter wanted a bunny of her own, so she was given one of the control subjects. However, she liked another one better and switched them out. Before she could get the bunny back home, a mean teenage boy knocked the rabbit out of her arms, and it fled into the wild. Flash forward, and the town is now being overrun by a stampede of giant rabbits, bigger than elephants. Close-up footage of slow motion domestic rabbits hopping were used for the stampeded. The town's solution was to flood the way into town and take down the power line, thereby electrocuting the poor things. Actually, I kind of liked the movie up until that point. I just have a thing for giant growth. The final scene almost implied that the remaining regular rabbits might still have the altered genes for this to occur again. TNT stopped airing the movie on Easters decades ago. For awhile, they showed Bible movies, which were appropriate and fairly good. Now, they don't show anything special, or it they do, I don't watch. But, I still have Peeps and chocolate eggs.
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