Easter Chocolate

Easter is a lot more popular as a holiday in Australia than it is in the US. Quite a few people take off work from Friday through Monday, making it a nice 4-day weekend. Many shops and restaurants are closed as a result.

In the lead-up to Easter, all the stores stock chocolate eggs and bunnies. But my favorites are the chocolates that have a distinctive Australian spin - such as this one:



An Easter Bilby! Rabbits (which were imported to Australia in the 1860's) have wreaked an environmental catastrophe here - so I guess it might be "politically correct" to bypass chocolate bunnies in favor of chocolate bilbies. Rabbit Free Australia, a non-profit group seeking to raise awareness of the problem of rabbits in the Australian environment, started launched their "Easter Bilby" campaign back in 1991 - the idea caught on, and chocolate bilbies have been around ever since.

And then there's this little guy, who appeared on my desk on Easter morning:



A chocolate wombat! Wombats are to Australia what groundhogs are to America, except that they are considerably larger (wombats can grow to over 3 feet in length).

Of course, if you just want something more traditional, there's always chocolate eggs. And this year, friend Julie asked me to help her locate this:



A 1 kilogram chocolate egg - ENORMOUS! She had me pick up 2 of these, one for each of her grandsons (who are visiting from Adelaide this week). Julie reported that the eggs were a big hit:

"....there was shrieking
...OMG's
...for me?
...this is just the best Easter egg nanny
...can we take the box home too
...can we smash them open with our heads?"