Taking it to the Eggstreme

Morningside Presbyterian had their Easter egg hunt yesterday morning. There's a banner in front of the church, inviting the neighborhood to attend, and Lynsley forwarded the notice on Friday to our neighbors. Haygood is having theirs today after the 11 a.m. service, so neighborhood children who have not yet gotten sick on chocolate eggs and jelly beans have a second chance to do so today.

When I saw Lynsley's note, I was reminded of an NPR story I saw a week or two ago. When I saw the headline -- "Easter Egg Hunt Canceled due to Aggressive Parents" -- I thought it might be an early April Fool's story, but it wasn't. Last year, the Old Colorado City Association had sponsored an Easter egg hunt in a park in Colorado Springs. According to the NPR story,

Organizers of an annual Easter egg hunt in Colorado attended by hundreds of children have canceled this year's event, citing the behavior of aggressive parents who swarmed into the tiny park last year, determined that their kids get an egg. That hunt was over in seconds, to the consternation of egg-less tots and their own parents. Too many parents had jumped a rope set up to allow only children into Bancroft Park in a historic area of Colorado Springs.

Then yesterday here was a brief item in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution tthat the same thing happened in Macon. The headline in the newspaper was "Rowdy Parents prompt Macon to end egg hunt," but the headline in the online version was more alarming, "Macon Easter egg hunt cancelled after past violence." The event, in Central City Park in Macon, was cancelled because organizers said that "parents became violent while trying to collect eggs for themselves and their children in past years."

Bibb County Commissioner Joe Allen tells The Telegraph of Macon (http://bit.ly/HPI8OJ) that liability concerns led to the cancellation. Allen is founder and CEO of Kids Yule Love, which coordinated the event. Allen said he canceled this year's hunt because parents caused children to be hurt. He said that in past years, one woman was injured and several children were "trampled on."

I remember the egg hunts at Haygood, when our kids were little. There was a mix of bigger kids and littler kids, and some years the littler kids had their own area to search, or they got a head start. I don't remember seeing parents behaving badly, but I do remember some of the bigger children (relative to the smaller ones there -- they were all pretty small) going for all the eggs they could find and no one telling them to leave any for the smaller children. I also do understand as a parent not wanting your child to have an empty basket when the whole thing is over. I remember seeing, once at the Haygood egg hunt, a mother carrying a plastic grocery store bag with maybe a dozen plastic eggs in it; I saw her slip one surreptitiously into her child's basket during the hunt. She shouldn't have had to do that though; there is something wrong when parents don't retrieve their older children, once they've found their share of eggs, and to let the little ones find eggs too.

The organizer of the Colorado Springs hunt told NPR "the event has outgrown its original intent of being a neighborhood event." That's part of it, too; we behave better with people that we know, and at a large event in a city, we are surrounded by people we don't know. At a community egg hunt, the adults probably only know their own child, and don't feel any responsibility for the other children. We honk at the driver who doesn't move as soon as the the light turns green; would we do that if it was someone we knew? I do think the anonymity of urban life makes all of these tendencies toward bad behavior much worse.

I went by Morningside Presbyterian a few minutes after 11 yesterday morning. The egg hunting was mostly done, and the children and the parents all looked like they'd had a good time. There was a separate area for toddlers. Parents were taking pictures, and there was a man in a bunny suit. I asked him if I could take his picture and he replied by asking if he could take mine. I said sure, but he didn't have a camera; he did though still have a pink Easter egg he held up when he posed.





This morning I got up early and made hot cross buns, which Iain and I had before we went to the 7:30 a.m. service at Haygood. Afterwards, Easter breakfast with quiche and strawberries and orange juice, a herd of chocolate bunnies in a basket on the table. And gratitude that I live in a neighborhood that is still able to host Easter egg hunts.