The danger of Easter

Easter is a big deal here and it’s scary. That was obvious when the Easter displays popped up in all the stores as soon as the Christmas ones were put away.

I’m pretty sure that when Mr. Hallmark had the inspiration to turn another religious holiday into a huge commercial enterprise, he must have been overlooking a meadow in Switzerland. Every lawn, every garden, every budding tree looks like the cover of any Hallmark Easter card ever printed. It’s like Easter was invented here.

What is this tree? Its flowers are unreal.

It even comes with the soundtrack of a cacophony of chirping birds all the time. So much so that I honestly was looking around for a speaker one day assuming that the sounds of nature must be manufactured and were being pumped out via stereo. It’s all just story-book perfection.

So where’s the danger you say? What could be the risk in skipping through fields of tulips and daffodils to the sound of birds and frogs chirping away?

There is no risk until you enter the shops and you find yourself surrounded by the prettiest Easter chocolate you ever did see. The real-estate given in each store to the Easter chocolate display makes Christmas look like just a random long weekend. It stretches as far as the eye can see and is lurking around every corner.

Chocolate bunnies of every size and flavour.

Back home the temptation of Easter treats was easy to mitigate because you could simply ensure that what the Easter bunny was hiding around the house was limited to jelly-beans and those waxy, foil wrapped chocolate eggs. Easy to pass up those nuggets of corn syrup and gross fake-chocolate.

Nothing like that exists here. All chocolate is good chocolate. Delicious, rich, melt in your mouth, chocolate. There is no crappy chocolate here and very little non-chocolate Easter candy. No Hershey’s kisses, no Peeps, no weird coloured eggs with a mysterious sugary white filling.

Ewww, feels like a cavity just waiting to happen.

Even the gold foil wrapped chocolate coins are melt-in-your-mouth-amazing chocolate. Every wee little taste of chocolate leads to another bite and another and another until you’ve consumed the entire giant damn rabbit.

The only saving grace is that the chocolate, like everything here, is crazy expensive which means we do limit how much we buy. Every time I’m tempted to buy a bag of the yummiest chocolate eggs in the history of the world the $18 price-tag stops me short.

So instead I’m doing my best to just stay focused on the opportunities for skipping through tulips and daffodils.

This week provided ample opportunity to deeply inhale the splendor of Spring. Lunch with friends by the lake in Zürich, lazy lunch breaks spent reading in the park and a trip to the Zürich Zoo to see all the Spring babies.