Egg Decorating

The theme for this year’s egg decorating contest was Dr. Seuss. As usual, the entries were amazing. I had expected a dozen Lorax eggs since that movie just came out, but only one person made a Lorax. I suggested, and was very vocally voted down, that half the entries should be disqualified since they weren’t actually characters from Dr. Seuss books. But the majority said it was the spirit of the theme that was important, not the author. So P. D. Eastman, Maurice Sendak and forgive me but the guy who wrote Make Way For Ducklings were represented. There was a Star-Bellied Sneech, Yertle the Turtle, Horton and a clover flower with a fuzzy white spot on it for the Who that Horton heard. There were two Thing Ones but no Thing Twos. The winner was one of the non-Seuss characters, a dog in an egg car from Go, Dog, Go!

I suppose I should mention that all those crazy egg decorators are related to me. And this year, none is under the age of eleven. Even the eleven-year-old will turn twelve in a few weeks. Every holiday that a lot of the family gets together we have some sort of themed contest. One Christmas the theme was Gingerbread House. My daughter, who was working construction at the time, actually built a gingerbread house complete with plumbing and electrical fixtures. Another year the theme was snowmen. My brother cheated. He came down from the mountains with actual snowmen in an ice chest.

Halloween pumpkin contests are usually fun as the contest is different. Where all other contests have a theme and you can use any material, for Halloween, there is no theme, but you have to use an actual pumpkin. Mom won one year by making a pumpkin pie but we stopped that by having a pumpkin chunkin’ contest the day after. We climb on the roof and see who can chuck their creation the farthest. Gotta love the sound when they hit the driveway.

You might think that our family is very competitive, but in fact, these contests are really the only time we compete. It is simply our break from the very cooperative way we live the rest of the time. We are so close that our kids don’t refer to themselves as this family or that family, but simply as “the cousins”. As in “Me and some of the cousins are going skateboarding.” As much as we cringe at how they mangle the language, we have to smile at how close they all are.