HAM and candy: hard to beat (Shutterstock).

Palm Sunday has passed and Easter Sunday is straight ahead of us. As a kid, this was considered third on the scale of favorite holidays, behind Christmas and Halloween, and anticipated in that order, and ahead of Thanksgiving and Fourth of July.
(Birthdays were in a separate classification, since you didn’t need to share them with your siblings or other associates, unless they happened to share birthdates).

Christmas, of course, was the champ of all holidays, involving a long, delicious run-up, lots of fun stuff like school (later, office) parties, gifts and all the food you could eat.

Halloween was also an event whose approach was keenly desired. Schools had costume contests – I hear they still do, except for rabbits (for semi-obvious reasons) – and candy exchanges and the more daring older sisters and brothers told scary stories without a shred of truth. Remember the one about the parked couple and The Hook?

Aw, but Easter. Halloween’s tiny candies – and the occasional piece of fruit or a quarter – gave way to a truly meaningful array of tooth-challenging and tummy-gurgling confections.

Your parents – most of them, anyway – filled for you big vessels of wicker (or plastic) with a mountain of candies, including chocolate and sugar eggs, bunnies and the like. If carefully husbanded, you could make your stash last well into mid-May.

The only thing that “delayed” the feast of sucrose was Easter Mass. We were Holiday Catholics, which meant we made sure to go to church regularly for Christmas and Easter, but not too regularly on other Sabbaths.

Our pastor Father Murphy, always took the opportunity to demand to know where we were the other 50 weeks of the year.

We didn’t mind the mild chastisement. There was ham and yams and hollow chocolate bunnies the size of real rabbits. It’s just too bad eventually we have to end up giving out the baskets instead of getting them.