Ghosts of Easters Past

HAPPY EASTER to all those who celebrate!

When I was a child, my mom made all my and my sister's clothes, including play clothes (shorts, pants, tops), school clothes (skirts, blouses and dresses because you NEVER wore play clothes to school), and even our special occasion clothes. This latter category was pretty much limited to Christmas and Easter.

Easter Sunday was a BIG DEAL at our house. In some ways even more than Christmas, because at Christmas you stayed home with your family. At Easter, you went out and paraded your finery for all the world to see. In addition to our Easter dresses, my sister and I always wore little white hats, usually with silk flowers and ribbons, and short white gloves, which I'm sure we fidgeted with during the entire church service. We also got new shoes, usually white patent leather.

Like I mentioned, my mother made our dresses and her own, too. I remember for several years the most popular dresses for little girls were made of a nylon tulle material with flocked flowers, kinda like dotted swiss fabric but with flowers instead of dots. You wore a colored satin slip under the dress and those stiff nylon net petticoats to make your skirt stand out. The dress buttoned up the back and had a satin or velvet ribbon for a sash, tied in back with a big bow.

This piccie I found on a vintage clothing site looks almost exactly like the Easter dresses my sister and I wore for several years. Alas, none of our actual dresses survived. After Sunday services, we always went to the park for a picnic and Easter egg hunt with all our cousins (about 14 of us kids total).

Yes, all in our "good" clothes. Any dress that survived the grass and food stains intact was eventually passed down to some of the younger cousins or kids of friends who didn't sew (almost unheard of in those days!).

Since my sister was a blonde and I was a brunette, my mom inevitably dressed her in blue and me in pink. To this day, when I select clothing, pink is the absolute LAST color I chose.

One Easter that was particularly breezy, I remember the wind blew my hat off my head and into the lake. Much crying ensued.

There were always plenty of eggs. My grandmother and at least one of my aunts had chickens. The eggs, however, were brown which made for some interesting colors when mixed with the Easter egg dye.

Please share some Easter memories with Aunty! What did you do as a kid to celebrate that you wish you still did?