Alone in my kitchen on a Saturday morning, I dyed six boiled eggs and six raw potatoes and used a teensy paintbrush to add squiggly lines, daisies, and other doodles, returning me to my youth as an observant Methodist who really knew her resurrection-specific hymns. The eggs came out in stunning shades of marigold, magenta, and cornflower blue. The potatoes came out sort of yellow, or sort of pink, or sort of purple, all of which you may recognize as colors that potatoes already have when you buy them at the store. I hated them.
When I painted HAPPY EASTER on one of the potatoes, it looked like a threat. When I baked them in my oven, their skins (naturally) crinkled and came somewhat unstuck from their insides. This had the effect of making them look shriveled and even more sinister. When I put them in the egg carton next to my beautiful half-dozen Easter eggs, I thought: Only a person who was lying would do this and say it was good. Without being too overwrought about it, the whole project felt like a symbol not of renewal but of the wan stupidity of our cultural moment.
The average price for a carton of eggs last month was $6.23, which is, we all agree, a lot for eggs. But it’s not really a lot for a craft project that also serves as a cultural ritual and can also serve as breakfast, so long as you put your craft project and cultural ritual in the refrigerator. (Until recently, I’d assumed that all families eat their Easter eggs, but apparently some people put them on display in their house, after which you certainly can’t eat them.) Sure, if an egg is really too expensive, replacing it with a potato could be called ingenious. But the many deficiencies of this replacement are immediately obvious. For instance, dye doesn’t work as well on a brown potato as it does on a white egg. Potatoes are uninspiring objects—people evoke them when they want to suggest that something is lumpy, dumb, or useless. Eggs are lovely, smooth, elegant, and the subject of fine art. Eggs are revered. You can’t just swap one thing out for another because they are a similar size and weight.
I know I am being judgmental—decidedly not the point of Easter. But this insincere hack rudely assumes that children can’t tell the difference between a simple, nice thing and a more complicated, far inferior thing. I will concede only one point to the potato-dyers. As The Atlantic put it rather grotesquely in 1890, eggs symbolize “the bursting into life of a buried germ.” I have to admit that this is a pretty good way to describe tubers as well. It made me briefly consider burying my Easter potatoes in the backyard and waiting to see if they would grow into more Easter potatoes. Season of hope and all that.