Easter chocolate (BabberBlog guest post)

Tomorrow is Good Friday and I'm excited to welcome a relatively new blogger to the fold. Lewis has been blogging over at BabberBlog for the last couple of months while awaiting the arrival of his first child (hopefully in a couple of weeks if he is punctual!).  He's written a great guest post for me all about that which you cannot escape from at Easter - chocolate!

Please do pay his blog a visit and show him what a bunch of lovely, warm and welcoming people we are. But first...how much chocolate is too much?

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I’ve never done a guest post before.  When Chez Mummy asked for volunteers to do one for her blog I wasn’t expecting to hear back when I said I’d like to.  So, before I start, a big thanks for having me! 

Easter then.  I wasn’t raised in a Christian household, so the meaning of Easter has, to me, largely revolved around chocolate.  To my mind, that’s no bad thing.  Bit of a grim business the story of Easter.  Not really my sort of thing.  But chocolate, yes, that’s something I like. 

Image credit

I hadn’t thought much about what Easter would be like for my son when he arrives.  I don’t think newborns eat chocolate, so I probably don’t have to worry about it this year.  But when I do have to think about it, in a couple of years, I’m going to want my child to have the kind of chocolate haul that I became accustomed to as a child.  If the number of eggs didn’t reach double figures I felt cheated!  I had a large and generous family, plus we’re all on the, erm, big-boned side, so the fattening effects of Cadbury’s finest weren’t high on the worry list. 

Easter morning was a festival of indulgence; only now do I realise how ridiculous my mum’s “no more than two eggs before breakfast” rule was.  Of course, inevitably, by lunchtime my siblings and I were stuffed full, ready to burst (and, some years, judging our capacity badly and suffering vomity consequences).  It was awful, but we loved it. 

Back at school after the holidays and the Easter high was still with us, conversations were had with everyone you knew: “how many eggs did you get?”  Everyone seemed to have a similar approach, we’d all been caught up in feverish gluttony for a couple of days. 

But I bet it’s not like that now.  I can imagine the horror on other parents’ faces if my boy let slip that he’d eaten pretty much his own weight in chocolate.  Probably there’d be calls to Social Services.  Maybe I’d be advised to consult a nutritionist on my boy’s behalf. 

I was a volunteer Teaching Assistant for a few weeks last year and none of the kids seemed to be throwing anything but salad and fruit into their mouths come lunchtime. 

Probably the shift in attitudes is for the best, after all, we have our entire adult life to sit in front of the TV and eat whole bars of Galaxy.  But I can’t help remembering that joy, that excess, that so-wrong-yet-so-right feeling of attacking an Easter egg and knowing that there were LOADS more still to go. 

I don’t think a single egg and a handful of raisins would have quite the same effect.