This year I am grateful that the Easter Bunny won’t be stopping by. The shambolic mess that the break‑and‑enter bunny left last year has left me thankful for a reprieve.

There are many things that I celebrate at Easter… family traditions, the ceremony and stories of Easter accounts and the extra holiday time that I am able to share with my beautiful earthly angels.

I definitely do not celebrate the intrusion of a rabbit who can bypass all the security measures of my Man Cave and leave behind a messy trail of munched carrot, ground-in paw prints and strewn chocolate.

Last year my girls and I had anticipated a visit from the Easter Bunny and in their kindness, they pleaded for a snack of carrots and milk to be set. My girls had done some basic mathematics to calculate that lugging a sack of chocolate eggs around the neighbourhood was going to need some extra sustenance. They figured that emptying my fridge’s vegetable crisper would be a sacrifice of carrot, broccoli and cauliflower that they were prepared to make.

I didn’t think to make allowances for tidying up his almighty mess. Yes, the Easter Bunny is very real and I am glad for the reprieve this year and saddened that my earthly angels will skip out on the joyful Easter shenanigans of last year.

Last Year’s Trail of Destruction

This is what Easter morning looked like last year for my daughters.

Outside, the fur that had been ripped from the hide of Easter Bunny was caught in the splinters of the wooden paling backyard fence as he tried a quick bunny-hop exit from the neighbour’s bad‑tempered dog Max.

From the back fence, my girls traced the Easter Bunny’s footprints up the path to the locked security door but couldn’t account for how the footprints continued on the other side. Once inside the Easter cottontail had been pretty careless in gnawing through the gift of carrots. Shreds of carrot were strewn about the Man Cave. There must have been some urgency to the delivery because chocolate eggs had been flung about the place.

The trail led to the cat flap in the back door and out the other side. Apparently, Max had taken a bite out of the Bunny’s chocolate egg sack and little eggs continued to form a trail as the rabbit footprints faded.

Miss Six and Miss Ten girls thought that it was hilarious to wake up to such a shambles.

They also seemed to interpret the mess as permission to add to the calamity by turning furniture over to uncover chocolate treasures under beanbags and sofas. The Easter morning required some Sherlock Holmes-style sleuthing to unearth the eggs that had intermittently leaked from the tear in the Easter Bunny’s sack. They raced up and down the driveway and footpaths sniffing out stray cocoa treats.

For all the joy and excitement, I was also wrecked from lack of sleep. Planning a sleep-in on an Easter or Christmas sunrise makes as much sense as asking “Do you have any homework?” I always know ahead of time what the result is.

Plus, unthreading the cotton wool from the buds took longer than I expected and catching it on the back fence in the dark to fake a trail of rabbit fur ran past even my late bedtime. Cutting stencilled rabbit paws using a fine scalpel was fun but time-consuming. Gently sifting flour over the stencil to create a path of paw‑prints followed by lurching around in the dark to dot eggs along the Easter Bunny’s exit ran right up until 2:00 am. Playing Easter Bunny as a single dad is full-on and I believe that my children are worth the effort and then some!

This Year and the Next

This year, sleeping in on Easter Sunday could be a real possibility. Miss Seven and Miss Eleven will be in mum’s care this time around so I will miss the excited squeals from my daughters discovering the Easter Bunny’s chocolate stash.

The quiet will be peaceful yet not necessarily restful because thoughts of my daughters will tumble through my head. I will smile to myself, imagining their happy experience of Easter with mum.

And, I will begin to skip ahead to next year as I mould thoughts in my head of my daughter’s waking into my care on Easter Sunday to an Easter Bunny motorbike wheel print running through the length of our house with chocolate strewn about on either side.

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Photo by Tim Gouw/Unsplash.