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A BAD HARE DAY

Once upon a time, Darrel Bristow-Bovey invented the Easter Chicken...

We all have holidays that haunt us. For some it’s Christmas, maybe for others it’s Diwali, Pesach or their birthday. For me it’s Easter.

“Easter?” said my partner sceptically when I told her this. “How could Easter possibly have hurt you?”

So I sighed and told her my tale of woe. It all happened a long time ago, when I was a university student in Durban, short of money, and I signed up to be an Easter bunny.

The idea was I would dress up in a full-body, furry rabbit suit with an oversized rabbit head and mooch around a department store spreading joy and encouraging children to pester their parents for Easter eggs. How hard could it be?

I don’t know where the department store sourced that cheap bunny suit, but the lack of breathability of the bright-pink acrylic fur wasn’t helped by an inexplicable inner lining that must have been made from a discarded asbestos blanket.

In Durban in late summer, it was like being sewn into a floppy-eared sack of my own sweat. If real rabbits feel half as hot in their fur, I don’t see how they ever have the energy to make more rabbits.

I couldn’t have been any hotter than if a 12-year-old had set fire to me, which is precisely what one of them tried to do. His parents spotted him just as I was beginning to twitch my bunny nose at the scent of burning plastic. They somewhat begrudgingly stamped me out and took the little arsonist off to reward him with ice cream.

Another problem was that whoever made my costume had a shaky grasp of proportions. My eyes were too wide and staring, my rabbit teeth too long and gleaming. Even before patches of my fur were scorched and melted, I looked like a murderous circus clown, a carnivorous were-rabbit. Every child under the age of six either screamed in abject terror or started kicking me in my soft rabbit underparts. The older ones demanded I give them presents.

“I’m not Father Christmas,” I replied. “I’m the Easter Bunny. I just bring eggs.”

“Where do you get the eggs from?” asked one smart alec.

This stumped me. Where exactly does a six-foot imaginary lagomorph source a poultry by-product?

“From the Easter Chicken,” I offered lamely.

“There’s no Easter Chicken!” he yelled.

“There’s no Easter Chicken,” his horrible mom agreed.

“You tell me where they come from then, if you know so much about it...”

“I don’t like your attitude,” she said.

“I don’t like your child,” I replied.

The child started crying. Making children cry wasn’t part of the job description, but the heat was starting to get to me.

“Don’t worry, he’s not the real Easter Bunny,” the mom assured her little sociopath. “He’s too stupid to be the Easter Bunny.”

“There is no Easter Bunny,” I said unkindly.

“Shut up!” yelled the mother.

“You shut up!” I yelled back. “And you – stop crying or I’ll hide your eggs somewhere you’ll never, ever find them!”

“Get out of that suit!” said the store manager behind me.

Although I very much wanted to get out of the suit, you can push a rabbit only so far, I explained to my partner, showing her how I ended the day trying to punch the manager with my gigantic, padded rabbit paws.

“And that,” I concluded, “is why I don’t like Easter.”

She looked at me oddly.

“Did you just tell me that story so that you could say you were once a hot cross bunny?”

“No,” I replied, but I do wish I’d thought of it.