Nina In New York: Hunting The Most Dangerous Game (The Easter Egg)

A lighthearted look at news, events, culture and everyday life in New York. The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.
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By Nina Pajak

This weekend, an Easter egg hunt at the PEZ Visitor Center in Connecticut went full on Lord of the Flies. Parents lost their minds, "stormed" the field early, stole eggs from the baskets of small children, threw elbows at toddlers, made kids cry, scorched some earth, and then fled.

"It was like locusts. Everybody just descended and they're like locusts. Everybody just descended and left," one employee said in an interview with CBS New York.

Those are undoubtedly the words of a traumatized person.

Meanwhile, not far from that deranged scene, my daughter and I attended and participated in our very first Easter egg hunt with some family. Or we tried, at any rate. It was exciting. It was confusing. While it was not particularly dramatic, violent or embattled, it was surprisingly competitive and over blindingly quickly.

The setting was the town hall green of the charming, seaside New England town where we were visiting. A cast of high school volunteers cheerfully separated out the groups of waiting children and their parents by age ranges. I looked around at the sea of tiny, eager kiddos staring out at what looked like an endless field of pastel-colored, plastic eggs. What treasures did they hold? Candy? Small, useless toys destined for the garbage can after mom and dad observed the mandatory, respectful grace period? ACTUAL TREASURE? You could read the anticipation all over their innocent, angelic . . . lean, hungry, anxious faces. The longer we waited, the more I could almost feel their muscles tensing. Several times, the woman in charge warned that we were moments away from go time. Was that an actual whistle around her neck? Oh, god. What was this to be? My daughter and her toddler cousin were deeply involved in spinning around in aimless circles, unaware of the immense pressure they were under.

"Okay, guys," we adults said, growing increasingly nervous. "When the whistle blows, our strategy will be to head for the furthest part of the park. Got it? Okay? Are you guys ready?"

"Ready!" They yelled back at us. Then they resumed staring at the sky or a blade of grass or whatever it was they were really interested in doing. Meanwhile, we shifted our weight back and forth and kept our focus on the eggs in the distance. We nervously cracked a few Hunger Games jokes. And then: the whistle!

"Go, go!" we shouted at our toddlers. "Come on, guys!" We tried to hustle them along as older children zipped around us, hoovering up eggs with alarming speed and bloodlust. Our kids, on the other hand, doddered around with absolutely no urgency, walking past perfectly good eggs and slowly picking one up every so often. And that would have been okay, honestly. We could have suppressed our adult instincts to win if our kids didn't care. But they did. A lot, actually, which became very clear when the eggs had all vanished after perhaps two minutes of "hunting." At one point, as her son verged on tears, my sister-in-law secretly plucked an egg from his basket and dropped it on the ground again in order to give him a chance to pick up another one. But before he could even reach down with his tiny hand, some psychotic hawk of a child swooped in out of nowhere, grabbed it and ran off.

I'm sure that wherever he is, Jesus is glad he went through that whole death-resurrection thing so that we might celebrate him in this deeply pious fashion.

For a moment, it was difficult to get our heads back in perspective. We wanted our kids to get a fair shake. We didn't want them to feel as though they'd experienced an injustice or missed out on something because an older kid had snatched it away. And in that moment, I suppose I could have maybe seen how something as innocent as an Easter egg hunt (and this one was certainly innocent) might turn a crowd of otherwise reasonable people into an unruly mob of fanged lunatics hellbent on literally taking candy from babies. But it really was just a single moment. For as the dust settled, we were able to shake it off and return to the real world where three-year-olds don't need more than five or six eggs filled with junk we'd rather they not have anyway. They've got a lifetime of manufactured competition and stress ahead of them—why impose it early, and for something as idiotic as an Easter egg hunt?

So we let our kids eat some cheap candy and then spent a bunch of time on a nearby playground, where kids of all sizes who had just been diving for eggs now played together nicely and shared equipment without incident. Let's hope there's a lesson in there somewhere.

Nina Pajak is a writer living with her husband, daughter and dog in Queens. Connect with Nina on Twitter!