When did Easter become a second Christmas?

When I was a kid, the Easter Bunny confined his efforts to filling your basket. But now, at least in those households where the breadwinners still have good jobs, it seems like the basket has become the springtime equivalent of the Christmas stocking -- just a starting point. Or from the kids’ perspective, maybe it’s more like an afterthought. The good stuff is what spills out onto the table or floor, too big and expensive to be confined to such a quaint container. Checking the basket comes after you’ve examined that shiny new bike or video game system.

I’d been vaguely aware of this trend the past few years, but it came sharply into focus yesterday when it was revealed that our youngest child was grumbling about how “everything we get is suckish” compared to cousins and friends.

Here all this time I thought we were celebrating the arrival of spring with symbolic representations of new life. I can build a case for chocolate bunnies, or even springtime accessories like batting gloves or Frisbees, but they’ve got to fit both an Easter basket and our budget. Which, now that I think about it, does make Easter a lot like Christmas, because at our house Santa still confines his gifts to what he can wedge into a stocking.