Does anyone actually color potatoes for Easter?

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Like countless others who have left their hometown to live a sinful, secular life in a fantastic American city, I no longer actively practice Christianity. But a few times a year my upbringing over space and time whispers to me, and I have to listen. The sound is the loudest on Easter, which is also the most important Christian holiday is also the greatest fun.

I could talk about Easter all day. The daffodils, the brunch. The color scheme, the smell of grass, the annual screening of Veggietales: an Easter caralWhat is the same story as Charles Dickens’ A Christmas loungerExcept that it is set to Easter and all characters and vegetables work in a factory (the Scrooge character is a zucchini). And above all the Easter eggs! This is the easiest of all the seasonal craft (no carving) and the most satisfactory (edible).

This year, people with online lifestyle brands -or people who strive for online lifestyle brands suggested numerous ways to keep the coloring tradition alive without pushing for eggs because they have online lifestyle brands. For example, you can color marshmallows in jumbo size or produce peanut butter, which you then coat in colored white chocolate. You can paint stones. The story was widespread, by local television and radio stations and even by The New York Times. “Easter eggs are such expensive Americans colored potatoes” Just reported (although most of the story was about a milk farmer who had replaced real eggs with plastic replicas for an annual Easter egg hunt).

I don’t think many people actually make Osterspruds. As with goldfish or breakfast flakes from scratch, making breakfast flakes from scratch, coloring potatoes mainly seems to be a good idea for a video that you can publish online. Many Instagram commentators reacted to the Easter potatoes by “what is in the Great Depression” and “These potatoes make me sad”. And yet because I love Easter and curious about the world, I decided to try it myself – just to see if it was somehow fun.

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In my grocery store from the local Brooklyn there were no classic Paas egg-colored tablets, so I bought a “organic” kit that cost three times as much (6.99 US The Atlantic. I bought a dozen eggs ($ 6.49) and a bag of yukon gold potatoes that were bright enough to color The Atlantic to. Then I looked for advice online how to proceed. Most of the time I wanted to know if I should cook the potatoes before or after coloring. A popular blog of Homemaking called the Kitchn gave detailed instructions on coloring Easter potatoes and “they save some money while bending their creativity for the Easter bunny this year”. The suggestions, for which the potatoes in ground turmeric, crushed beets or three cups of mashed blueberries-have not been instructed as inexpensive as promised. (Such a volume of fruit could cost north of $ 15.) But I found that I should decorate the potatoes and Then Cook them. Thank you very much!

In my kitchen alone on a Saturday morning, I dyed six cooked eggs and six raw potatoes and used a teensy brush to add squeaking lines, daisies and other doodles, which means that I had returned to my youth that really knew their resurrection-specific hymns. The eggs came out in breathtaking marigold levels, magenta and corn flower blue. The potatoes came a kind of yellow or a kind of pink or a kind of purple that they may already see as colors that potatoes already have when they buy them in the shop. I hated her.

When I painted HAPPY EASTER With one of the potatoes it looked like a threat. When I bought her in my oven, her skins (of course) scratched her and came a little restlessly from her inside. This had the effect that they shrunk and look even more scary. When I put them in the egg carton next to my beautiful half Easter eggs, I thought: Only one person who lied would do so and say that it was good. Without being revised about it, the whole project did not feel like a symbol of renewal, but the black stupidity of our cultural moment.

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The average price for an egg carton last month was 6.23 $ 6.23, which we all agree with, a lot for eggs. But it is not really much for a craft project that also serves as a cultural ritual and can also serve as a breakfast as long as you put your craft project and cultural ritual in the fridge. (Until recently I had assumed that all families eat their Easter eggs, but apparently some people have exhibited them in their house, after that they can not eat them.) Sure if an egg is Really Too expensive to replace it with a potato could be mentioned brilliantly. But the many shortcomings of this replacement are immediately obvious. For example, Dye doesn’t work as well on a brown potato as on a white egg. Potatoes are uninspiring objects – people call out when they want to suggest that something clumpy, stupid or useless. Eggs are beautiful, smooth, elegant and the topic of visual art. Eggs are worshiped. You can’t just replace one thing with another because you have a similar size and weight.

I know I’m evaluating – not the point of Easter. But this insincere hack roughly assumes that children can recognize the difference between a simple, nice thing and a more complicated, far inferior thing. I will only add one point to the potato dyers. As The Atlantic Set it quite grotesque in 1890, eggs symbolize “life in the life of a buried germ”. I have to admit that this is also a pretty good way to describe tubers. I was briefly considered to bury my Easter potatoes in the back yard and to wait for them to grow into more Easter potatoes. Season of hope and all of that.

From May 1890 edition: the Easter bunny

Instead, I ate them all and then they were gone, which felt much better.