Easter in the 1950s: A tale of pastel peeps, chocolate crosses, and clip-on bow ties
Oh, yeah, Easter in the 1950s. A time when the Easter Bunny wasn’t either a capitalistic corporate mascot or CGI nightmare, but a slightly disquieting, floppy-eared creature you might encounter in a department store, smelling a little like second-hand cigarette smoke. For kids like me, growing up in western Pennsylvania, Easter wasn’t just a holiday-it was a Christian ritual, involving interesting candy choices, poorly tailored clothing, and an annual inner-psychological struggle brought on by the Stations of the Cross and a calorie filled celebration.
For me, Murphy’s 5 & 10 cent store was the holy grail of Easter excitement. I remember running past the lunch counter, which was always filled with folks sipping coffee, downing either a hamburger or egg salad sandwich, or daintily devouring homemade pie. In the corner of the back counter there was a plastic cooler of citrusy potion of unclear origin churning endlessly. It was probably made in some factory from a combination of alchemy and chemistry.
But my focus was never on sandwiches or Lemon Blend. My destination was the Easter display where there were decorations galore but, most impressively, live peeps all dyed in various pastel colors. These were real baby chicks, and they were dyed in every Easter color Crayola could dream up. These tiny fluff balls, pocket-sized Easter unicorns, were corralled into a 4-foot by 4-foot cage, and they chirped in a unified frenzy. When I was younger, I begged my parents to buy me a few every year, but they never gave in. Then when I was older, I wondered what over-enthusiastic little kid would get them and love them literally to death.
And then there was the trauma. Holy Week was no joke. Between the incense, the bell ringing, the dramatic retelling of Christ’s suffering (in Latin, no less), and the unsettling crucifix imagery, Easter prep often felt more like a scary movie marathon that ended in a celebration. I’m convinced my lifelong aversion to cream-filled chocolate eggs might possibly stem from associating them with the slow tolling bells of Good Friday.
Unlike today’s T-shirts and jeans, we had real Easter outfits. Boys got light gray little suits that screamed “tiny accountant.” We got new black dress shoes that could double as foot prisons and a clip-on bow tie that always went sideways by the end of church. Girls got the full treatment with fluffy dresses, anklet socks, patent leather shoes, gloves, purses, and hats that were held on by little elastic bands under their chins.
After Mom’s Presbyterian or Dad’s full-on Catholic Latin church service (where “Confiteor Deo omnipotenti” was the Gregorian chant du jour), we’d come home to baskets of sugar and fun. It was a Candyland sprint to happiness.
The Easter baskets had green plastic grass that stuck to everything like doubled-sided tape. Buried inside it were treasures like hollow milk chocolate crosses and bunnies, jellybeans in every color (including those strange white ones no one trusted), and a yellow marshmallow chick or two. The pièce de résistance? A chocolate egg the size of a toddler’s fist, filled with a sugary goo that could easily pass for reconstituted fruitcake. One bite, and you’d remember every bad Christmas decision your family ever made.
Sometimes, the Easter Bunny (or our grandmothers) would toss in a 50-cent piece or, if you were really lucky, a silver dollar. That was big money.
The grand finale was the family lunch: a heaping feast of ham, potato salad, hard-boiled eggs, and pineapple upside-down cake. That meal was the manifestation of faith, family, fun, and a little bit of resurrection-themed mystery.
The 1950s Easter surely was a simpler time — when the chicks were dyed, the chocolate was hollow, and the only thing more complicated than Holy Week was trying to figure out which dyed peep might grow-up to be an attack rooster.
Nick Jacobs is a resident of Windber