The sights and sounds of Easter: harmonious pastels, funny bunnies (get your pic with a mascot character even if you’re an adult!), the best seasonal candy of the year, and millions of plastic eggs.

Easter Egg hunts, across Cape May County this weekend, are fun and free. But it’s a little strange if you think about it. For reasons bigger than any of us it’s cheaper to extract crude oil from the earth, polymerize it into plastic poured into egg molds in Chinese factories, ship the eggs to America, and smack them onto store shelves than to use eggs from a chicken.

Plastic eggs will last longer on the Earth than anybody reading this. That’s just the way the machine works: the facsimile is cheaper than the real thing, especially with Bird Flu causing havoc on the avian supply chain.

I didn’t quite get the Jesus-Easter Egg analogy as a kid: my main interaction with eggs was to watch them sizzle on a frying pan. The plastic easter egg, then, is an abstraction of something already a bit fuzzy.

Ever been to the Easter egg hunt at Amanda’s Field in Upper Township? It’s a beautiful sight. Those plastic eggs look great against the bright grass. It was canceled this year because there weren’t enough volunteers to do it all: stuff thousands of eggs, spread them around the park, and to wrangle and clean up the chaos of a hundred kiddos.

It has me thinking about the 180 million plastic eggs Americans buy at Eastertime. Tariffs, too, are on the mind this week – Happy Easter! One positive bump – amid the horrors – on Mr. Trump’s wild ride is that it forces me to reckon with my own consumption and the “default” ways of doing things, which at Eastertime, means 180 million plastic eggs.  

“Consumption” is one of those liberal frou-frou words you read in a New York Times op-ed or in a New Yorker article about eating less meat, but whenever it’s used, it is shorthand for: we just use too much stuff, which is the gospel truth.

180 million plastic eggs; soak it in! Right now, you can buy 30 plastic eggs for $1.50 at the Michael’s in Rio Grande. At Aldi, you can forego the gift-stuffing part of an Easter egg hunt and buy eggs filled with toys of unknown quality and origin.

The tariffs are coming fast and quick. Bearing that load will mean thinking outside of the box and thinking: was all this stuff really worth it? They certainly haven’t bought happiness, this coming from an avid online shopper. Are there solutions – like cardboard eggs – that are slightly less absurd than the status quo?

I still dye Easter Eggs, from a chicken, every year. It’s a triple-whammy activity: dye the eggs with friends and loved ones, hide them later in the day for a fun scavenger hunt, and eat them at dinner. Sometimes the least abstract thing, the thing closest to real life and the natural world, isn’t the easiest or cheapest. But it is the truest.

Contact the author, Collin Hall, at chall@cmcherald.com or at 609-886-8600 ext. 156