Tradition!

Easter Eve, another holiday approaches and thoughts of holidays past visit me like Dickens's ghosts.

Four of us, in our jammies, sitting under the yellow light at our old kitchen table. My mother mixing up boiling water and vinegar with tablets in old coffee cups. My dad handing out the eggs he boiled earlier in the day and laid out on a white tea towel to dry. Easter baskets full of candy I played with, but never ate.

My own three children up on their knees around our kitchen table. Dunking eggs with oversized soup spoons after trying to write their names on them in white crayon.

My nieces and nephews and my own children gathered around Grammy on her last Easter with them. Coloring eggs, eating jelly beans, taking turns sitting on Grammy's lap.

Our traditional dinners of baked ham with pineapple and cloves and brown sugar glazing. Sweet potatoes, baked macaroni and cheese, deviled eggs; every year as long as I can remember until eight years ago when everyone nearby was grown up and some people didn't eat meat and others didn't eat ham and we all decided to go out to brunch.

That's our new tradition now, but I still boil eggs and lay them out on white tea towels and dye them in little cups and make up Easter baskets full of candy I would never eat myself!