Even at my young age I was suspicious of the easter confectioners.
Even while feeling the excitement rise, breaking into the thin cardboard casing and unwrapping the fragile patchwork of chocolate, even as I found the seam and tried and failed to make a clean break even at that first crack, in my child-like cynicism I felt the disappointment of the hollowness of an easter egg.
The half shell cradled the fallen fragments, allowing me to collect every flake with a wet finger, but still I felt cheated, more so as my mother insisted that we save the rest til later, her words somehow conspiring with the glass and a half chocolate makers, seeking to dress up the thin, brittle shell to appear more than its fragile inadequacy.
Then grandad came
with a two pound purple brick of a bar, fresh from his fridge, and he challenge us to a bizarre dressing up feast where we'd attack the mountainous chocolate armed with a knife and fork, hampered by hat, scarf and mittens, gambling against the next throw of the dice, against racing siblings, to hatchet chunks from the heavy tablet and shovel as many broken shards into our mouths before, at the roll of a six, the woollen regalia was wrenched from us, leaving us with only the prospect of our empty shell of Easter disappointment.