Me fleeing Marissa and the demonic expression she has on her face.
I usually go home for Easter, but the ancient Price is Right spinner the pope uses to decide when the holiday falls landed on the 21st this year, also the birthday of my girlfriend, Jody.
She wanted to combine the two celebrations and have an Easter egg hunt. But we couldn’t just have an ORDINARY Easter egg hunt. We had to spice it up.
So we concocted our own version. I give you: Easter Egg Hunt: Hunger Games Edition.
Eggs are hidden in the normal fashion and the players must find them. The difference is, everyone’s basket is placed in the middle of the playing field, and you must deposit an egg in your basket for it to be safe — on the way there, the other players can tag you and steal it.
You can only bring one egg back at a time. Each egg can only be stolen once. Hiding eggs on your person and sneaking them back is fine. No basket guarding. And most importantly, no striking with closed fists.
We’re still working on the name. Easter Egg Hunt: Hunger Games Edition is just acting as a placeholder, as the original name I came up with, the EXXXtreme Adult East Egg Hunt, gave a lot of people the wrong idea.
We were just trying to make the no-kids thing clear. Though our parties tend to have some kind of rambunctious game involved, a game a child might enjoy playing, when children have ever gotten involved, they’ve ruined it.
For instance, several of our friends’ children participated in a sack race one party, and the adults found themselves hobbled, because they couldn’t be as fully competitive as they wanted to be. I mean, they couldn’t trip the kids, or use their superior body mass to hip-check them under the feet of other hopping adults.
I’m not even saying these games can’t be played by children, or a combination of children and adults. I’m just saying we wouldn’t involve ourselves in these mincing competitions, because we’d be too busy on the opposite side of the party, playing a high-octane version of your game while drunk.
The night before, we had packed 140 eggs (originally 146, but I got to eating them) with as many treats as possible, which were hidden by two non-participating friends Easter afternoon as the other players were arriving.
The buckets were lined up, the rules were explained a fourth time, the countdown began. And we were off.
I unfortunately did not have the best tactics. You see me there above, dramatically sprinting into the distance while everyone else is simply bending down to grab the eggs at their feet? That’s what I’m talking about.
But for what I lacked in tactics I made up with a disregard for my own physical well-being. I hurled myself after players returning their eggs, and often ate dirt trying to deposit my own.
In one such instance, I was making a bee’s line to return an egg when two competitors rushed towards the gap between me and my basket from either side. Suzi, a friend of ours who elected to be the photographer instead of play to avoid ending up in a chilly mud puddle, held up her iPhone ten feet in front of me, so I sprinted the last few steps towards her side, caught her by the waist, then swung around her like a pole, shooting myself off at an angle and dodging the first competitor. Suzi was thrown back as I dove for my basket, reaching my arm out and slam-dunking the egg, shattering the cheap plastic like a glass backboard.
“YEEEAHHH!! FUCK YEEEAHHH!!!!” I brayed as Suzi righted herself from a chilly puddle.
“Hey! That was MY bucket,” our friend Michael protested, pointing to its remains.
“Oh.” I quickly deposited the egg in the correct basket and ran off.
Squeals and screams and shrieks and the constant goooosshhe of bare feet slamming into saturated ground bounced across the yard as the buckets continued to fill.
“Are you bleeding?” My friend Thom asked with concerned tones.
I looked down to see blood oozing from my thumb, and an overlay of chaotic red scratches on my forearm from when the bucket broke.
“Yeah!” I exclaimed, ebullient. Minor injuries just mean you’re playing the game right.
The gameplay only lasted about 20 minutes but felt much longer. It turned out the two most physically reckless players — my friend Marissa and myself — actually got the LEAST amount of eggs. Two other players got 19 each.
We took a sweep of our property to look for strays, since any eggs subsisting after this day would just be pollution. There’s still a couple out there, which will inevitably be run over by the lawnmower and confettied across our yard.
It was a truly great game, one I hope those reading will spread to their relatives over 18. Just come up with a better name.
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