We'll be gathering at 2:00 today at Mom's for Easter dinner. Projections are for nineteen people to be there: boy, am I glad she has her garage available for the dinner.

I'm taking a layered salad. Usually I'm the "Salad in the bag" type of shopper, but for holidays I get head lettuce and tear it up. I try to think good thoughts about the people that are going to eat it (while I dearly love my family there are a couple that try my patience). And today I thought about childhood Easters.

We must have been poor, or maybe everyone was poor back then. We didn't have Easter baskets, well, not store-bought ones. We would make baskets out of construction paper. When my brother J.R. and I hit double digits, we were allowed to help the Easter Bunny fill the baskets. We would hide in my parents' bedroom with our "baskets" and five bags of candy; jelly beans, larger Easter Eggs that were filled with a cream type base, bunnies and chicks made out of a marshmallowy substance, flavored bunnies and chicks made out of a candy-corn like substance, and for chocolate the malted milk speckled robins eggs.

J.R. and I would carefully divvy up the bootee. Two jelly beans to a basket might be where we would start. Then one bunny or chick per basket. And on we would go. The little kids would try to peek in the windows, but we had drawn the shades. Occasionally we'd thump on the floor. "Oh Mr. Bunny," we would say, and we could hear the little kids giggle.

The big advantage for J.R. and me? Well, of course the bags wouldn't come out even. After all, we were making six baskets. Somebody had to take care of the overage, didn't they? We were ready volunteers.

Why is it that the good-old-days so seldom involved expensive things?