As a child, I took great pleasure in devouring the Easter bunny. I have photographic proof that I was ravenous. I also recall huge cardboard eggs, their two halves lacquered on the outside and spilling candy like benign shrapnel if I was not careful. The inside of the egg contained some irritating green grass that was not real and took up valuable space that might have been reserved for more sweets.

I have memories of my brother dressing up as a påskkärring (a Swedish custom of children masquerading as Easter witches), each cheek a target of red, as I enjoyed practicing sibling rivalry and making all sorts of comments to my brother clad in seasonal costume. I have photographic evidence of this escapade also, but as we age we learn to exercise discretion.

Much later, in America, as an adult, I was exposed to Easter egg hunts. I still have not figured out the attraction of this pursuit. First of all, the eggs are not the hardboiled eggs I remember as a child, but plastic canisters filled with candy or other substitutes of what hens on the farm used to lay in Sweden. The pleasure in those eggs was learning from my mother that the eggs had to be boiled with exactitude and also finding the green ring surrounding the solidified yellow of the yolk. I enjoyed and at the same time found it irritating to peal the eggs. Often the shells came off in very small, sharp intervals of calcium, and there was just enough challenge to get at the food without it being too much work.

To get back to the horribleness of Easter egg hunts — at least for me — I wonder how some parents can allow their children to bulldoze smaller children in an effort to get at the eggs. Or worse, parents getting in on the game, blocking another’s child from having a lucky hunt. To me, that is like a grownup taking away a baseball in the stadium stands from a child.

But is this season special? Or has it been demystified, another secular holiday with not even a momentary image in many people’s minds of Jesus riding a donkey into Jerusalem, large palm leaves complementing the picture? The colorful illustration in my Swedish children’s Bible to this day accompanies me, and if I did not understand completely or even remotely the suffering of Christ and his rebirth, the celebratory moments of Christianity, I am still at least haunted by the picture of how big Jesus was and how small the ass was and how I felt sorry for the animal.

Now I try to avoid being exposed to Easter sales and Easter egg hunt turned recruiting events of many churches, though I marvel, reluctantly if it is possible to do so, at the Easter bunny. A mere grownup breathes with some difficulty inside a costume and as he sweats up a storm, though not of Biblical magnitude, even adults want to have their photo taken with this anthropomorphized Easter bunny with his stupid pink ears and grey fur, a smile pasted on the artificial skin of the animal, frozen like that of a model or newscaster chirping quickie news.

One of the reasons I am fascinated by the Easter bunny, besides wondering what eggs have to do with the cousin of the hare, is that the Easter bunny appears to be less an icon of controversy than Santa Claus during the other big, ostensibly Christian holiday. Lutherans, Baptists, Catholics, Jews, a whole array of people, seem to get along with the Easter bunny without bringing thoughts of a violation of the spirit of the season and what its religious affiliation should be and exactly how it should be expressed and celebrated. It could be the Easter bunny is non-denominational, but sitting outside today in our unseasonably warm early March on a day in the mid-80s, I thought, the Easter bunny is Catholic. He is Jewish. He is also Lutheran and Baptist.

As I record the Easter bunny’s religious affiliation, it does occur to me that the Easter bunny perhaps is female and not male. Why do we assume the Easter bunny is male? It certainly is difficult to discern any sexual characteristics when looking at its colorful, glittering fatigues, or, if aluminum is not the clothing of choice, a pink or otherwise eye-catching color of gloss that can directly be consumed without disrobing the chocolate. At least Santa has a rather large beard.

Yes, I am not a fan of holidays, Easter included, because the religious significance has been eroded for so many and the commercial accoutrements have fossilized the sensibilities of people to buy what is often crappy candy, overly sweet, with not enough cocoa in the chocolate, or simply a sugary mix to create eggs that are larger than Jelly Beans. It is, as they say, a free country, so what I am going to do on these marked calendar days is re-familiarize myself with the passages from the Bible that have to do with Easter. That is my entertainment, and I am not even particularly religious in any conventional or strict sense. Happy Easter!