Every year, around this time, exciting red and blue and green packages appear on the shelves at my local Albertson’s. And every year, around this time, I buy one of those shiny foil-covered boxes, remove one of the contents, and eagerly eat it.

And every year, around this time, I spit the contents of the box out of my mouth and say, “Motherf*cker! Gross!”

That’s right. I’m talking about Cadbury eggs.

I don’t know how it is that I manage to forget every year how disturbing these little candies are. Maybe it’s the bright primary colors, designed to disable my higher brain functions and replace them with a craving for pretty candy.

Candy eggs. What a hellish concept that truly is. Candy eggs. The unfertilized offspring of a chicken, only made out of chocolate and sugar.

Sugar yolk. Yolk that tastes like sugar. Sugar that looks like yolk. It is a fundamentally skewed concept. Yolk. Made out of sugar. Need I say more?

I need not, but I will anyway.

The Cadbury Egg is merely a symptom of a larger social distortion: The Easter holiday. Here is a holiday in which we celebrate the crucifixion and resurrection of a religious figure by hiding chicken eggs from children and encouraging them to eat baby chickens* whole.

Setting the religious/secular discrepancies aside, the holiday is bizarre. The concept is that a large, invisible bunny makes his rounds every year in order to stick a bunch of chicken eggs in bushes, or around your house.

Wait a minute… a bunny that hides eggs? Bunnies don’t even lay eggs. Where the hell is this rabbit getting all these eggs? Does the rabbit run a chicken farm? Does he sneak around rural Illinois, violating chickens and stealing their eggs? ‘Cause if so, I don’t want that damn bunny in my house. That bunny has some serious sociopathic tendencies.

I had a bunny once. And it hid stuff in corners, all right. But they weren’t painted up, and they sure didn’t taste like candy.

*made of puffed sugar

For those of you who don’t remember, the Power Glove was released as a peripheral to the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989. That is also, coincidentally, when it entered my heart.

The Power Glove itself, on the other hand, didn’t actually work that way. Using it was more like sign language for NES. After about two hours of flexing my index finger and yelling “Jump. JUMP!” at the screen in a panic, I gave up and learned to operate the wrist-mounted control pad with my left hand.

Take it off? What’re you, nuts? No, no, perhaps you don’t understand. This was a Power Glove. You don’t just take a Power Glove off. So it makes gameplay a little harder, instead of easier as advertised. That’s an acceptible sacrifice.

Update: Looks like they finally got it right.

Apparently, during the late 60s, there was a crime wave of people dressing up as monsters.

The purpose of this was to scare people away from one of the following: 1) a treasure, 2) a competitor in the inn/resort/theme-park business, or 3) an inn that was about to be forcibly purchased or repossessed from an owner who was no longer able to make payments.

Enter the Mystery Machine, a large green van filled with four people and a talking dog with a speech impediment. None of them (the stoner aside) ever believed in the existence of the supernatural, but they didn’t seem to mind the fact that their dog had a fourth-grader’s vocabulary.

The four could never agree on what climate they were in: Velma and Fred both wore heavy sweaters, Shaggy always wore the same t-shirt, Daphne dressed like she was going to a nightclub, and Scooby, being a dog, was naked.

They’d show up and, after practically destroying the place they were supposed to be protecting, they’d unmask some wretched old fart who would inevitably utter some variation of the phrase, “and I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids.” This, apparently, was the most spiteful way the culprit could express his frustration at being foiled in his elaborate scheme by a few high school kids and a dog.

The perp, by the way, was always the only one other than the kids and their client to have been introduced by name.

I can swallow all that; stranger things have happened. What I can’t swallow, however, are the holographic projectors.

Even to date, we have not been able to perfect the projection of three-dimensional holographic images. We must have merely forgotten how; in the sixties, apparently, they were available at your local Radio Shack.

Somehow, the guy who had been dressing up as a Yeti to scare the bank away from repossessing his ski lodge managed to afford eight or ten holographic projectors and a luminescent body suit. Not only that, but he had built a highly expensive and complex control system with video cameras in the basement, where no one thought to look.

What’s even more disturbing is this: at the end of every show Velma (it was always Velma) would instantly know the precise location of each holographic projector. And when she activated them, they always played the same 30-second loop of action, over and over again. Never mind the fact that the “holographic” monster had thrown a table at them during the show.

I always respected the so-called “villain” more than the stupid kids. After all, this guy — who turned out, after the mask was removed, to be an 80-year-old gimp with a Pacemaker — had just moments earlier been running up and down the length of a football field, trying to strangle Shaggy and Scooby.

That kind of effort takes commitment, and to be foiled by a group who only had one member with an IQ above room temperature… well, let’s just say my heart went out to the guy.

When we were kids, we used to buy the big 24-pack of Valentine’s day cards (or rather, our mothers used to buy them for us), and we’d pass them out at random to everyone in the class.

You know the ones I’m talking about. They came perforated, four to a sheet, in a variety of cartoons; Peanuts was a staple, but there was also Pound Puppies, etc. Sometimes you’d even find G.I. Joe, but your mother wouldn’t let you buy that one because it was too cool and Valentine’s day isn’t cool.

And then your teacher would make you give them out to everyone. Everyone. Which was a weird time, because while you didn’t really want to give them to the opposite sex, if you were a guy (and I was. Still am, come to that.) you sensed there was something even weirder about giving them to other guys*.

And in this manner, you’d learn about love: that it’s traded in little slips of paper.

I wonder what would happen we tried this as adults? Just walk onto the street and start handing out My Little Pony valentine cards to random people?

Try it; let me know how that comes out.

*Unless, of course, you were gay. In which case, I imagine V-Day was really awkward.