One Simple Hack to Ruin Your Easter

Like countless others who have left their hometown to live a sinful, secular life in a fantastic American city, I no longer actively practice Christianity. But a few times a year, my upbringing whispers to me across space and time, and I have to listen. The sound is loudest at Easter, which, aside from being the most important Christian holiday, is also the most fun.

I could talk about Easter all day. The daffodils, the brunch. The color scheme, the smell of grass, the annual screening of VeggieTales: An Easter Carol, which is the same story as Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, except that it’s set at Easter and all the characters are vegetables who work in a factory (the Scrooge character is a zucchini). And most of all, the Easter eggs! Of all the seasonal crafts, this one is the easiest (no carving) and the most satisfying (edible).

This year, because of shocking egg prices, people with online lifestyle brands—or people who aspire to have online lifestyle brands—have suggested numerous ways to keep the dyeing tradition alive without shelling out for eggs. For instance, you can dye jumbo-size marshmallows, or you can make peanut-butter eggs that you then coat in colored white chocolate. You can paint rocks. The story has been widely covered, by local TV and radio stations and even The New York Times. “Easter Eggs Are So Expensive Americans Are Dyeing Potatoes,” the Times reported (though most of the story was about one dairy farmer who’d replaced real eggs with plastic replicas for an annual Easter-egg hunt).

I don’t think many people are actually making Easter spuds. Like baking Goldfish or making breakfast cereal from scratch, dyeing potatoes seems mostly like a good idea for a video to post online. Many Instagram commenters reacted to the Easter potatoes by saying things such as “What in the great depression is this” and “These potatoes make me sad.” And yet, because I love Easter and am curious about the world, I decided to try it myself—just to see if it was somehow any fun.

[Read: I really can’t tell if you’re serious]

My local Brooklyn grocery store didn’t have the classic Paas egg-dyeing tablets, so I bought an “organic” kit that cost three times as much ($6.99) and expensed it to The Atlantic. I bought a dozen eggs ($6.49) and a bag of Yukon Gold potatoes that were light-colored enough to dye and small enough to display in a carton ($5.99), and expensed those to The Atlantic too. Then I looked online for advice on how to proceed; mostly, I wanted to know whether I should cook the potatoes before or after dyeing them. A popular homemaking blog called The Kitchn gave detailed instructions on how to dye Easter potatoes and “save some cash while flexing your creativity for the Easter Bunny this year.” The suggestions—which included soaking the potatoes in ground turmeric, shredded beets, or three cups of mashed blueberries—were not as cost-effective as promised. (Such a volume of fruit could cost north of $15.) But I did find out that I should decorate the potatoes and then cook them. Thank you!

Alone in my kitchen on a Saturday morning, I dyed six boiled eggs and six raw potatoes and used a teensy paintbrush to add squiggly lines, daisies, and other doodles, returning me to my youth as an observant Methodist who really knew her resurrection-specific hymns. The eggs came out in stunning shades of marigold, magenta, and cornflower blue. The potatoes came out sort of yellow, or sort of pink, or sort of purple, all of which you may recognize as colors that potatoes already have when you buy them at the store. I hated them.

When I painted HAPPY EASTER on one of the potatoes, it looked like a threat. When I baked them in my oven, their skins (naturally) crinkled and came somewhat unstuck from their insides. This had the effect of making them look shriveled and even more sinister. When I put them in the egg carton next to my beautiful half-dozen Easter eggs, I thought: Only a person who was lying would do this and say it was good. Without being too overwrought about it, the whole project felt like a symbol not of renewal but of the wan stupidity of our cultural moment.

[Read: The case for brain rot]

The average price for a carton of eggs last month was $6.23, which is, we all agree, a lot for eggs. But it’s not really a lot for a craft project that also serves as a cultural ritual and can also serve as breakfast, so long as you put your craft project and cultural ritual in the refrigerator. (Until recently, I’d assumed that all families eat their Easter eggs, but apparently some people put them on display in their house, after which you certainly can’t eat them.) Sure, if an egg is really too expensive, replacing it with a potato could be called ingenious. But the many deficiencies of this replacement are immediately obvious. For instance, dye doesn’t work as well on a brown potato as it does on a white egg. Potatoes are uninspiring objects—people evoke them when they want to suggest that something is lumpy, dumb, or useless. Eggs are lovely, smooth, elegant, and the subject of fine art. Eggs are revered. You can’t just swap one thing out for another because they are a similar size and weight.

I know I am being judgmental—decidedly not the point of Easter. But this insincere hack rudely assumes that children can’t tell the difference between a simple, nice thing and a more complicated, far inferior thing. I will concede only one point to the potato-dyers. As The Atlantic put it rather grotesquely in 1890, eggs symbolize “the bursting into life of a buried germ.” I have to admit that this is a pretty good way to describe tubers as well. It made me briefly consider burying my Easter potatoes in the backyard and waiting to see if they would grow into more Easter potatoes. Season of hope and all that.

[From the May 1890 issue: The Easter hare]

Instead, I ate all of them and then they were gone, which felt a lot better.