The Easter Bunny respects local tradition and custom.
In Beauneville, the Easter Bunny brings baskets of goodies to the children and youth, and scatters painted wooden eggs around the Beaune Estate. The eggs are antique; nobody can quite remember where they came from. There are exactly seventy-two eggs, each numbered and painted with a distinct color scheme. The rules are simple: when all seventy-two eggs are found and turned over to the presiding adults, all children present receive a gift. This creates incentives for children to collaborate as they hunt down the eggs. At no time in living memory has any Easter egg hunt in Beauneville failed to recover all of the eggs.
The child who discovers egg number one, which is slightly larger than the others and golden in color -- is known to all as the "Easter Prince" (or "Princess", as they case may be) for the following year. Roderick never found the golden egg, but Molly found it once, when she was three. She remembers nothing of the event.
Bedford Glen has a somewhat different tradition. There, eggs contain money and gift cards, and the child who finds the most eggs gets to keep all of the eggs. This creates a certain disincentive for some children to report their findings, because they will lose what they found unless they found the most. To circumvent fraud, the Bedford Glen Police cordon off the egg-hunting area and check the pockets of departing children.
The child who finds the fewest eggs is bullied mercilessly for the year following the hunt.
In Stapleton, the eggs are filled with Food Stamps. Illegal aliens are invited to attend.
There is no Easter egg hunt in Smileyville, since Smileys deem such events too stressful for the little ones. Instead, the Easter Bunny simply drops off baskets of eggs filled with pickles and cheese, to which every youngster is entitled regardless of effort or accomplishment.
Roderick attends the Spring Holiday Candyfest with Molly and the Blooms. The Spring Holiday Bunny arrives at noon, to much acclaim from the children, each of whom receives a Spring Holiday Basket full of nutritious sugar-free fat-free snacks.
"Why do they call it a Candyfest?" asks Roderick as he rummages through little packages of Veggie Booty and Tomato Chips.
"It's the principle of the thing," says Molly.
The Smileys depart the Spring Holiday Candyfest at the Church of Nothing and drive to the Hello Spring! event at the Church of Anything. The Happy Spring Rabbit is already there, leading the yoga session. Rabbit invites the Smileys to join the group in Adho Mukha Svanasana ("Downward Facing Dog"), but they decline and fill their plates at the buffet table.
At the Church of Whatever, the covered dish supper looks very inviting, but after the nice buffet at the Church of Anything the Smileys prefer to just sit and listen to Lagomorpha Leporidae lecture on climate change. The gist of it: there is something called climate, and it's changing.
The last stop for the day is the Church of Irony, where Roderick and Molly meet up with Mr. Smiley; Alexander was tired and fussy, so Clotilde took him back to the cottage. This evening. Mr. Herbert Peacock riffs on whether or not "Christ rose from the dead" should be treated as an ironic statement. His conclusion: there is nothing to celebrate, you just have to muddle on with your miserable life.
