Jesus Is Risen! Have some jelly beans!

Ahh, another Easter is rapidly approaching, and we're all grapping with the big questions that inevitably begin to surface around this major religious holiday, namely, what am I going to do with all these black jelly beans?

I love Easter. Easter is always a good time, except for the time when I was four and my mother took me to get my picture taken with the Easter Bunny. Oh, my mom got the pictures all right. Pictures of me cowering in fear at this gruesome creature with giant pink ears. But after years of therapy, I’m happy to report that I can now go into malls during April.

This year, I tried to make some of my friends and family some Easter Baskets. However, I somehow felt very guilty about going out to the store and contributing to the mass commercialization of this sacred religious holiday. So, in quasi-protest, I decided to only purchase candy in quantities that were spiritually significant.

I know, I know. Rationalization. But it made me feel a little better about selling out Easter. So I went to the shelves and carefully selected the quantities of candy. I went up to the check-out line with my arms full of stuff, which I plopped down on the conveyor belt.

The check-out girl looked at the mass pile of candy rolling toward her register and looked at me like, “You have got to be kidding me.”

“Don’t worry, you don’t have to scan every one,” I said. “I know how many there are.”

“How many do you have,” she asked, as she looked at my piles of candy.

“It’s very easy,” I replied. “I counted very meticulously and I used numbers that were easy to remember.”

“Ok,” she said. “Mind telling me what those numbers are?”

“Well, I have 11 of these eggs filled with Starburst jelly beans, representing the original 12 disciples, minus Judas.”

She kind of laughed at me. “Okay, how many of these?”

“Oh, I have 33 Peanut Butter Eggs, representing the number of years Jesus lived.”

She just kept scanning and politely smiling at me like I was nuts.

“Four Easter bunnies,” I continued. “Two for the two thieves on the cross, and two for the men on the road to Emmaus who Jesus appeared to.”

She scanned the candy and put it into the bag.

“And five greeting cards,” I finished.

“What do the five cards mean?” she said pointing to my cards.

“Umm, those represent the five people I’m going to be giving Easter cards to.”

So I’m a little weird. So what.

I love Easter baskets. Growing up, my mother would give me an Easter basket every year. The highlight of course, as it is every year, is the solid chocolate Easter bunny. And how appropriate, because really, nothing says “Jesus has Risen” like a block of solid milk chocolate chiseled into the likeness of a small fecund woodland rodent.

Of course, I have no qualms about this tradition. And as I dug through the 430 pounds of plastic Easter grass in the basket to get to my prize, I anxiously anticipated the sweet joy that can only come from gnawing off the ears of a candy rabbit effigy.

But this year, as I was at the grocery store buying chocolate Easter bunnies, I noticed something that was quite jarring to me. Right there, on the front of the box, it read: Solid Chocolate Easter Bunny. And then, underneath that title was a colon and a little nameplate that read:

Parsley Pete.

Like this was an action figure or something. Parsley Pete with Bazooka Action Move. I started to chuckle at this, until I realized that my chocolate Easter bunny actually had a name. This made me uneasy. I normally don’t give my food names. It would be different if this bunny were one of thousands grown on the chocolate bunny farm. But this bunny was special. It had a name. A personality. A unique identity. This was Parsley Pete, for crying out loud.

So I am now afraid to eat him. My conscience keeps bugging me.

But the Easter Basket isn’t just home to Parsley Pete. Contained within the grass are all sorts of yummy candies. And also a box of a food product which I am very wary of. They are called “Peeps” and seem to be of the same weight and consistency of styrofoam packing chips.

Now, I am pretty much a food connoisseur, and by that I mean that I will eat pretty much anything. However, there are a couple of food products which I am very wary of. The first are those orange crackers with peanut butter on them that kids used to have in their lunchboxes. You know what I’m talking about? These crackers were like, so orange they appeared to be radioactive. Personally, I don’t like my food to glow in the dark. Just a general rule.

Then there’s Twinkies. When I was in second grade, they told us that we were going to take a tour of the Hostess Factory. For me, this was like telling us that we were going to take a Field Trip to Heaven. I envisioned King Dons as big as a semi-wheel and Ho-Hos the size of large couches. But then I saw how they make these products. Twinkies, for example, are called snack cakes. They look like cake. They smell like cake. But do you think any of these see an oven? No way. They’re not Twinkie snack cakes. They’re Twinkies, America’s Favorite Snack Lipid Compounds Injected with Chemical Catalysts.

And I have always been distrustful of fruit roll-ups. There is nothing even vaguely fruit-like about fruit roll-ups. Fruit is not that flat. It’s like a Jolly Rancher mated with Fly paper, or something.

But the food product I am most wary of come out only once a year. They are those brightly colored marshmallow treats called “Peeps.” These things are apparently so dangerous that the FDA only allows for their sale once a year. Ever tried to get some peeps in, say, November? Ain’t gonna happen. There are no peeps. You’d have better luck finding good acting in a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

So these things only come out at Easter. My question is this: what the heck kind of substance are those peeps things made of? It’s certainly not natural. Very few naturally occurring substances are that pink. It’s like a highlighter exploded over candy, or something.

I was talking about this with one of my friends over Easter and so we ran a little experiment Sunday. His mom was making some hot tea, so I took one of the “peeps,” put it in a saucer and poured some boiling hot water over it. I was hoping to glean some insights into its composition as I watched it dissolve.

I swear to you, the boiling water had no effect on the peep. Instead, the brightly-colored coating on the outside kind of fused together to form this impermeable shell. It was like some sort of protective faculty given to the peep by nature. So I took the peep out of the boiling water (and I had to use a spoon because the water was so hot), I discovered that I’d accidentally created the hardest substance known to man. I took a butcher knife and tried to cut the peep. I’d have had better luck try to carve a motorcycle helmet. No kidding. NASA needs to do research this and start building rockets out of this stuff.

And I don’t even want to talk about the eyes. They appear to be pieces of black metal, but I am not sure. I wonder what would happen if you put these things in the microwave. I’m afraid to find out. They’d probably mutate and grow to like 600 feet tall or something and terrorize Tokyo.

And people voluntarily ingest these things. Simply amazing.

At least we have until next year for our digestive systems to break those things down. And a whole year to figure out how to get rid of those black jelly beans.