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

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.