Stuffed With Love (and Guilt): An Easter Story
Happy Easter! I’ve always loved Easter—maybe because it’s spring and everything feels possible. New beginnings and all that. The trees turn that bright “new green,” the flowers show off like they’ve been waiting all year for this moment, and the grass is lush and full of promise. You still believe you can stay ahead of the weeds. It’s a season full of hope.
The Easter Bunny was always one of my favorite holiday mascots. The Bunny brought me two of my most treasured things growing up: a chocolate bunny and a stuffed animal. So Easter morning always came wrapped in excitement and love.
I still have my Big Bunny stuffed animal—the one I got when I was five. Her name is Petunia. I’m pretty sure her name came from some children’s book my mom was reading to me at the time, though I couldn’t tell you which one. My mom loved reading old children’s literature to me, which, in hindsight, may not have been the gentlest bedtime material. We eventually made our way into the real Grimm’s Fairy Tales. And let me tell you, the originals were not pulling any punches. Wolves eating grandmothers, wicked stepsisters getting what’s coming to them… Grim, indeed.
But Petunia was not grim. She was wonderful. She was as tall as I was—at least, that’s how I remember it—who’s going to fact-check a five-year-old’s sense of scale? She set an impossibly high bar for the Easter Bunny, who somehow met expectations a few years later with Tubzie, a pot-bellied koala bear who looked like he had opinions about brunch.
Tubzie and Petunia became best friends. They still live with me. I have a few other stuffed animals from childhood that I couldn’t bring myself to part with. I blame The Velveteen Rabbit for the lifelong guilt I feel about letting go of stuffed animals. I mean, they just want to be loved enough to become real—and I took that seriously. It felt like my job to supply the love. There are a lot of animals now living in the back of the closet because, well… I just didn’t have enough love to go around. And then came the guilt—especially when I looked into their accusing plastic eyes.
That feeling got supercharged after watching Toy Story 2 and hearing Jessie sing When She Loved Me.
🎵 “When somebody loved me, everything was beautiful / Every hour we spent together lives within my heart…” 🎵
How is anyone supposed to live up to this?
Naturally, I passed this tradition along to my children. Every year, they’d receive a stuffie in their basket—until this year. I figured that now that Abbie and Annie have real pets and tiny apartments, they probably didn’t need another plush marsupial staring at them while they eat takeout. Cam still got one, partly because I didn’t want him to feel left out and partly because I’m not emotionally ready to stop.
Of course, everyone still got a chocolate bunny. I’ve never had any moral qualms about biting the head off something made of solid chocolate. Love has its limits.
