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How are populations inveigled to voluntarily surrender assets in pursuit of no material gain? Religion ardently inflicted that endeavor long before inception of recorded history. Secular cultural pressure detaches folks from their cash for the most decorous intrusive reasons. Valentine's Day is a watershed for stationers, confectioners, jewelers, and florists. If it keeps you off the couch it keeps you out of the dog house, hence Mothers Day. Why stop with family? Bosses' Day, Secretaries' Day... Grocers blanched with envy. They could scam consumers into tossing acceptable goods and replacing them with more of the same! Fashion operates in the large. What was in the $5 range?
Despite furious Vatican backpedaling re leavened bread and the Last Supper, spike placement hands and feet vs wrists and ankles, and that sponge soaked in vinegar (Roman equivalent of toilet paper), Christian Easter debuted as Jewish Passover. A century pause between cause and effect allowing memories to fade was prelude to intense marketing buoyed by every achievable noisome and frankly feigned advertising gimmick (still vigorously plied). Christianity is a religious Borg Collective sucking up popular nuances and proven imbecilities then calling them its own. Paganism was ripe with zealous Estrus celebrants. The reworked bottom line eructated an oviparous bipedal male lagomorph pursuing decorative folk arts - the Easter Bunny and his eggs.
Easter eggs are big business from simple dip-and-dye kits to glitter, lithographed shrink-wraps, appliques, all manner of intensely disposable effort, to superlative pysanky. My honey is Christ-besotted so we went shopping, squandering money destined for Lagavulin or firearms for a crappy cardboard box filled with copywriters' spew and FDA-approved food coloring. The full impact of a society so rich that it must destroy its contents to make room for new stuff hit us at the refrigerated egg display. Every egg had already been decorated, and we did not like it.
I am curious how long a jug of milk or bottle of vitamins has perched on a shelf. They are perishable. A can of beets would need be historic to go bad. Eggs do not need a slathering of fluorescent expiration date. Eggs are designed and fabricated to park under a warm hen for weeks. An egg gone bad is not a subtle thing. There was not an egg to be had - white, brown, or pygmy organic at triple the going price plus a blush of chicken manure in every box - without a datestamp. Our Easter aesthetics had been baffled with indelible blemish...
...for the nonce. I am a chemist. Dates were soon dispatched to mere memory, no doubt the same way supermarkets redate unsold goods using a cotton swap dipped in bleach to unravel the dye's molecular structure into colorless muck. The uniform surface dyeing properties of the eggs were thereafter compromised and so necessitated a bleach bath for all of them. Post-Easter egg salad promised to be anything but bland.
Clear paraffin drawn on the egg prevents coloration, thereby permitting white embellishment of a colored background or multiple dye impregnations if you have some volatile non-polar organic solvent to selectively dissolve away the wax. A stamp damp with bleach allows you to go the opposite direction and in aqueous milieu. Fusspot Easter egg kits are missing a bet by not offering diminutive injection-molded (paintable!) figurines to recreate an eggs-tatic tableau of a divine real estate deal gone sour on Golgotha Hill.
What of American mercantile excess pandering to implanted fears? The datestamp doohickey, obviously expensive to purchase and run, could offer a microprocessor upgrade to spray some surface kitsch in honor of the holiday - or every day! Are you going to buy plain eggs, or will you Save Our Children! by purchasing ornamented calcareous ellipsoids for your progeny's delight?
WARNING! text must be appended to every egg - cooking guidelines, bacteriological hazards, nutrition information, weight... in Spanish, Chinese, Korean, and English. An urgent national War on Undocumented Ova will draft recombinant DNA technology with unlimited budgets to refashion avian oviducts. Eggs will be laid inlaid with Braille and every one inspected by the empowered fingers of a heavily armed ocularly-challenged Federal inspector.
Each Easter each of us will join Christ on His Cross, freely bleeding at great expense from jackbooted State compassion. Easter Bunnies may watch from afar, fluorescent datestamps glowing on their bunny bottoms and a nearby butcher counting down the minutes. We are from the government. We are here to help ourselves to you all the minutes of your life.
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