Quick mention about the weather first before I go onto Easter eggs from long ago. After another lovely day the weather seems to be saving itself for Easter. We all want some nice sunshine over the weekend and instead we’ve been promised showers and even snow etc!
Easter Eggs from Long Ago
Back to the subject of Easter. If you read my blogs you’ll know that I’d written about the name ‘Easter’ being missing from Easter egg boxes. It just reminded me of when I was young and the difference in today and Easter eggs from long ago.
Money wasn’t exactly swishing around in our house. My dad had to work seven days a week as a miner just to put food on the table, and that went on for most of his life.
This is my dad on the right, with his brother and sister. It’s about 100 years old this photo, like a window into another world.
As a result, we didn’t have spare money for ‘fripperies’ like Easter eggs. So when an aunt (not really my aunt but a good friend of my mum) turned up with one for me it was such an exciting moment. I can’t remember having had an egg before that. Having said that, the shelves in the shops weren’t exactly crawling with the chocolate goodies that they are today. Although that would have been difficult anyway as there weren’t any supermarkets back then in the dark ages. We simply weren’t tempted like we are now.
The most beautiful Easter Egg
The Easter egg, oh the Easter egg in all its glory. It was a complete shell of chocolate, etched to look like a broken shell where a chick had hatched from it. But the best bit, oh, it was the icing sugar decoration on top.
There were sugar flowers of pinks, yellows and mauves, all neatly piped on with green leaves and yet more flowers of all the pastel shades that you could mention.
I’d never seen anything like it in my life before, and to this day can still remember the front of the egg being covered in all these wonderful flowers. Where the egg was joined in two halves, yet more icing sugar had been piped all the way around it making it look even more scrumptious. The drawback was that I couldn’t bear to break it and destroy all the flowers and colours in front of me, but eventually I suppose I did, although I can’t remember that at all.
Times were hard
I suppose that’s maybe why I was never fond of chocolate and ice cream, we just never had them to develop a taste for them.
I was born as the war ended, so can still remember rationing. As young children we didn’t get sweets anyway and by the time rationing ended, I was getting older but money was still sparse.
So if I got 2 ounces of sweets in a white paper cone once in a while, it was like striking gold. I’ve only developed my liking for chocolate this last four years or so, along with ice cream, so maybe I will get addicted to them. Although I think the likelihood of that happening is remote!
When I see the rows and rows of shelves laden with eggs of all descriptions, it never fails to take me back to my special Easter eggs from long ago. It’s strange how certain memories stick with us isn’t it.
Exciting tastes!
Now, there are sweets of every description to tempt us, such a far cry from my mum giving me an old threepenny bit to buy a few sweets from the shop on our road. I can still remember the excitement of standing in front of the sweet jars in all their tempting rows, wondering what I was going to pick with my three pennies.
Usually dolly mixtures won out or a boiled sweet, the both of which I still love to this day, but we didn’t get fat with them in those days. We were all too active as children to get fat, not like today where temptation is everywhere and at the same time kids spend a lot of time glued to their computers.
It’s nice to reminisce about the ‘good old days’ where we had to make every penny count and appreciated what we had.
Palm Oil Ban
You’re probably wondering what palm oil has got to do with Easter Eggs. Just have a look at some of the ingredient lists on the foods that you buy. You’ll be surprised to see where palm oil pops up – it’s in such a lot of foods. Not only does growing it lead to deforestation and loss of habitat, but waste causes problems too.
Plans are underway to stop the dumping of palm oil off the coast of our country, and about time too. We get our share of the awful stuff washing up on our beaches never mind that it is dangerous to marine life which is so wrong.
Tankers are to be stopped dumping the noxious stuff into the sea when they clean out their tanks. By 2021 it will be outlawed altogether, with European leaders also backing the moves. I just wonder why we have to wait until then with the tankers spewing out their muck and carrying on poisoning the sea.
It seems that the oil from the tankers will then have to be discharged to shore facilities, not sure what that will be, or how will it be policed. How does anyone know that tankers are discharging palm oil into the sea? If they’re caught, what will be done to stop it being pumped out and doing yet more damage?
Dog Walkers Beware: the Palm Oil on our beaches is very toxic to dogs if they eat it, because it’s full of bacteria. You must get them to a vet straight away.
You might also be interested in:
- Easter Eggs from Long Ago
- Gas Mantles and Peggy Rugs
- Life as a Coal Miner
- Mining Museum
- Old pit communities
- Remembering Steam Trains
- Saturday Morning at the Pictures
- Streets from Long Ago
- The Games we Played in the Olden Days
- The Good Old Days – coal fires
- The Outside Toilet
- The Rag and Bone Man
- Very old picture of a mining community
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