Like many children, I always looked forward to dying eggs at Easter time. My mother, father, brother and I would gather around in the kitchen, each of us “in charge” of gathering some piece of equipment. We had Corelle ware when I was a youngster, and as Mom bought most of her household goods during her “green phase”, the cups we had were the standard white with the green floral pattern around the edges.
Mom would carefully measure out the vinegar and boil the water in each cup, letting my brother and I drop the little dye tablets into the mixture. The tablets would fizz for a bit, and then the perfect white insides of each cup would have this liquid of the most beautiful and vibrant color. To this day, there’s something about that image that just plain makes me happy.
We would save the wire hoops that came in each kit from year to year, so each cup got its own hoop so as not to mix the colors and muddy the eggs. My brother and I would ponder each white boiled egg carefully, trying to decide exactly what effect we wanted to produce. Should we write our names in the clear wax crayon on the egg? Should we dye the egg, write something on it in the crayon, then dye it another color for a more layered effect? One year Mom made a baby chick out of one of her yellow-dyed eggs. I was very young, and not very neat-handed and envied her ability to do something so clever and cute.
My father also shared that admiring envy of my mother’s ability to do little artistically clever things with almost anything. He, himself, is not particularly an artist for all that he appreciates beauty and while he joined in the egg decoration for the fun of it, he never expected that he would create an artistic tradition that has endured nearly four decades.
One year, he decided he was going to dye an egg in several colors — green on one side, blue at an end, yellow on another side. He was careful to go light on the dye, so that each color was a light pastel. In looking at it, the egg reminded him of a coat of madras cloth he was especially fond of as a very young man. So, with great pride, he dubbed the egg the Madras Egg.
It was lovely, and all the more because he’d done something beautiful. We all decided that the Madras Egg was the egg we’d leave for the Easter Bunny, as it was so pretty.
Every year after that, the egg for the Easter Bunny was the Madras Egg.
Now, I have a household of my own and a nearly grown son. We still color eggs because it is so fun. We don’t always use the color kits, sometimes preferring just to use food coloring, vinegar and water for our dyes. My son almost always starts with a solid yellow egg, bright and happy, because yellow is his favorite color. My artist husband likes to try for a new effect, or something clever and memorable. Every year, I’ve made a Madras Egg in honor of my own childhood memories. But this year, we have the tradition going into its third generation as my son also made a Madras Egg of his very own.
