Spring and an Easter Giveaway

Already the days are getting longer. I am going to work now in daylight instead of dusk. The snowdrops and crocus are blooming througout my garden, as well as some of the early daffodils. Each branch is beginning to "green" and I can see the beginnings of buds breaking out on the rose bushes and the Hydrangea. I can't wait to see them come truly alive again!



The birdsong is getting a little cheerier. I listen to them as I walk up the laneway to work early in the morning, and they sound so happy. Nest building I presume, getting ready for the eggs and babies and hard work that is to come.



We got a new birdfeeder this month to replace the wooden table that we had before that was getting quite rickety, probably from having been blown over in too many wind storms. This one is a sturdy metal pole and the birds seem to love it so. We are calling it the Oak Cottage Hilton and it's nice to see them all out there enjoying themselves throughout the day. We have nuthatches, wagtails, tits, gold finches, blackbirds, song thrushes, doves, pigeons (of course) starlings (*%£$!) and our lovely little robins, just to name a few.



I know it's hard to believe, but Easter is only a month away!!!! How did that happen??? I was sitting here thinking I had oodles of time left, but only just realized that it is on the 23rd of March this year, exactly one month from tommorrow!



I love Easter. As a girl, I always had a new dress to wear to church on Easter Sunday and those itchy flesh coloured stockings of the winter were finally put away and I could wear knee socks! What a wonderful liberation! Everything seemed fresh and clean and new.



On Easter morning, our Easter baskets were full of lovely coloured eggs that my mother had painstakingly coloured with crayons from our crayon tin the night before. My favourite ones were always the ones she had done in coloured stripes, using every colour from the tin. After all the excitement had settled, she would pierce the ends of them with a pin and carefully blow out the egg inside and we would have a scrambled egg feast for our breakfasts, along with nicely browned bits of ham and buttered toast. No breakfast ever tasted finer. Sometimes she would let us have a go at the blowing and my how our cheeks would hurt aftewards. We'd spend the rest of the day with the empty coloured shells strung on yarn about our necks, like a gaily coloured necklace, each of us trying to see which one of us could get through the day without breaking any, and who would have the most unbroken coloured shells left by the end of the day.



Easter to me will always be bamboo baskets full of sparkly green Easter grass, crayon coloured eggs, icky coloured sugar eggs filled with marshmallow that I hated as a child, (but oddly enough crave now that I can't get them anymore) coloured jelly beans, and a chocolate bunny. As a child it was more often than not cheap chocolate bunny wrapped in gaily coloured foil, but now, as an adult I settle for Lindt. Rank has it's priviledges, as does age and now that I am buying my own bunny, nothing less will do.



I'd like to share some Easter Bounty with you, my readers, as well. I am giving away a Lovely gold foil wrapped Lindt Easter bunny, complete with red beribboned bell and a lovely Ferrero Rocher Egg filled with lovely chocolate and hazelnut truffles. To be in on the fun, just leave me a comment on this post, along with your preference of which of the two you would like. In two weeks time, I will draw two names and two of you lucky readers will be gifted with some extra Easter goodness this year!

This is the perfect time to come out of lurkdom and make yourselves known to me. Come on now, you know you want to! It's chocolate, and good chocolate at that!!! Who can resist???