Ah, a March mountain Easter, right after St. Patrick's Day! The memories! I remember being a little girl on Easter morning, with the temperature around ten below, not counting the wind chill factor. We kids leaped out of bed around 5 a.m. and stood as close to the woodstove as we could without getting burned, rotating our bodies slowly on tiptoe, like rotisserie chickens.

When we were warm, we raced through the frigid farmhouse to see what the Easter Bunny had left in our baskets. There were our precious eggs--dyed with difficulty the night before, because the vinegar kept freezing--and, nestled among our eggs, chilly candies galore. Our marshmallow peeps would be floating in mugs of hot cocoa. We broke a few teeth on frozen jelly beans and busted our frozen chocolate bunnies into smithereens with sledgehammers. Mama was in the kitchen, making oatmeal that we'd pretend to eat with our laps full of candy. Daddy was already outside, chipping a thick layer of ice off the van so that we could make it to the church Sunrise Service and breakfast.

We kids were relieved that the Easter Bunny had made it to the farmhouse at all. We always pictured him in a little blue coat with brass buttons and a bare rump, like Peter Rabbit. Our Easter cartoons on TV showed the Easter Bunny naked, or nearly so, and Easter was not much warmer than Christmas when it fell too early on the calendar. Sometimes, if Easter happened to fall around the middle of March, Christmas morning was warmer. Santa had his big red coat trimmed with white fur, his hat, and his big black boots to keep him warm. The Easter Bunny had fur, but was it thick enough? Shouldn't he still be hibernating? Would he get frostbite? Would we find him frozen stiff on the lawn, like a statue in the Beatrix Potter museum?

We needn't have worried. The E. B. showed up faithfully each year, no matter how early Easter arrived or how cold it was, and we kids stuffed ourselves with as much sugar as humanly possible before running back upstairs to get into our fancy Easter clothes. Judy Garland in Easter Parade had nothing on me. I remember how gorgeous I looked in my yellow ruffled chiffon over thermal long johns. Then I completed my ensemble with a full-length furry winter coat until I looked less like Judy G. ready to romp down Main Street, and more like an extra in Doctor Zhivago.  My matching yellow chapeau, crafted out of strawlike plastic, was crushed under the thick hood, making the hat curl down over my ears when I took off the hood at the Sunrise Service at church.

That's what we called it, and still do: the Sunrise Service. Some churches actually hold Easter Sunrise Services outside, so as to see the sun rise. None of those churches are located in Appalachia. Our congregation tends toward the elderly side, and we would surely have casualties. So we hold Sunrise Services inside, use our imaginations, and crank the radiator.

Ah, that's another thing I remember, just as if it were yesterday. How the pastor would crank up the heat. The church was so warm on Easter mornings! And full of the smells of Easter breakfast--bacon and eggs and gravy. I would run through the church parking lot as fast as I could and fling open the church door, and be socked with a blast of bacon-scented heat which would give me back at least some of feeling in my toes.

You see, I could cover all the rest of my body and still be dressed properly for Easter, but there was no help for my poor feet. Every little girl in the American South, whether she lives in Savannah, Georgia, or the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, must wear white tights and patent leather shoes on Easter morning, regardless of what the weather is like. This is actually a law in Mississipi, and in Virginia it is a Tradition, which is every bit as binding. How I envied my brother, who was still considered Easter-y enough for all sacred purposes in cowboy boots or work boots. To this day, the sight of patent leather shoes gives me chilblains.

The Easter services were always beautiful--white cloths on everything, flowers everywhere. The combination of sugar from my Easter basket, saturated fat from the church breakfast, and the 80-degree church made it a very dreamlike, holy experience. After church, we would go home and scarf down about half a pig and a few pans of Brown-n-Serv rolls, washing it all down with Pepsi. We would eat huge, fluffy mounds of mandarin orange salad, the kind you make with orange Jell-o and marshmallows. When we kids were little, this new influx of calories finished us off, and we all took naps--except for my younger brother, whom I have long suspected of being some kind of ultra-long-life battery disguised as a person.

After our Easter siestas, we would all go to Grandma's house for the big Easter egg hunt. It was hard to find the eggs in all that snow, but we were creative back then. Nowadays, kids are such wimps that they'd probably postpone the egg hunt until late May sometime, rather than go out and fight the elements for eggs. Well, we were made of stronger stuff in the seventies, my friend. Mom would hand each of us kids a basket and an ice pick and off we'd go. The ice pick came in very handy, not just to chip eggs out of the frozen turf, but to surreptitiously stab a sibling or cousin who was about to grab the big golden egg with the dollar bill in it before you did.

Those March mountain Easters of yore! We young'uns hardly even felt the cold--we were too hyped up on sugar. (Note to my cousin concerning the ice pick incident: it was my brother.)