I doubt many children will wake up this Easter morning and find dyed baby ducks or chickens in their Easter Baskets, but we did when we were kids. They sold them at dime stores, brightly colored baby ducks and chickens. I remember getting some baby chicks when we lived on Granville Avenue in Beckley. I was about 5 or 6 when I found 3 baby chicks in my basket along with chocolate bunnies and other goodies. One baby chick was pink, one was blue and the other a bright yellow. Often, those baby chicks would go belly up in a few days, but these didn’t. Our next-door neighbor, Buddy Turner just happened to raise chickens and kept them behind his house. He loaned us some chicken feed, told us to make sure the little guys had water and they did famously, pecking around the house and our back yard.
When I tired of my newfound pets and about the time they lost their colors, I donated than to Mr. Turner. I never knew if they grew up as lay egg-layers or as young fryers, but they had served their purpose.
The next year, I got a dyed baby duck, He was a cute little guy and waddled about the house for a day or two and then disappeared. We searched high and low – in closets, behind radiators, under the beds and appliances, but he simply vanished. We never caught the essence of dead, baby duck in the house, so we assumed he had escaped when somebody left a screen door open.
Then PETA got involved, saying that it was cruel to the baby birds and that a human may contact some mysterious disease. They were probably right, so today the only baby chicks to be found in Easter baskets are those awful tasting little yellow candy chicks. Gross.
We also dyed all our own Easter eggs back then. And I remember putting stickers on the outside of the eggs., Sometimes you could even tell what the stickers said, like “Happy Easter” and other messages, but usually the words were just a big, blurred smear.
I remember eating faintly colored hard-boiled eggs for up to a week after Easter. No refrigeration or anything – just room temperature, slightly colored boiled eggs. And they were good. I was disappointed when the last of the dozen disappeared.
Dying and hiding Easter eggs was fun. Searching for a lost baby duck – not so much.
