I love spring, and the spiritual renewal it brings. I love the flowers blooming all around me: crocuses, daffodils and freesias popping out of the ground; magnolia, apple and cherry blossoms in the trees.  I also love our family holiday traditions, especially the ones that include eggs – weaving colored eggs into sweet bread, coloring and hiding eggs in the garden, hanging miniature eggs in Easter Trees made out of fruit tree branches, eating chocolate eggs.

Preparing my house and garden for spring brings me a great deal of pleasure, as does sharing the season with my children and grandchildren.

I have written before about the Easter traditions at our house, here and here. This year I want to share with you my favorite work of children’s literature for Easter, an imaginative story in a picture book titled Humbug Rabbit.

This charming book was published in 1974 by author/artist Lorna Balian.  My oldest daughter discovered it in a public library display, and begged me to check it out.

After borrowing it from the library two years in a row, I purchased a copy, and reading the story has been part of our Easter celebration ever since.  It went out of print in the 80s, but in 2004 it was republished, and there are several editions now available both new and used from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

What makes this book so enjoyable is that there are two intertwined tales being told and illustrated simultaneously.  At ground level, Granny is busy preparing for Easter.  She waters her tulips, collects the daily egg laid by her hen Gracie, and plans to color and hide some of them for her grandchildren.

Under Granny’s flower garden, the Rabbit family lives in a burrow , and Mother Rabbit is doing her spring cleaning (“the floor of the burrow gets so muddy in the spring.”).  The children are very excited because another character, a mouse, told them that their father is the Easter Bunny.  Father Rabbit of course, says “Humbug,” thus the name of the book.

The plot gets complicated and, by four or five year old standards, quite funny.  Granny can’t find Gracie’s eggs because the hen begins to hide them from her.  Fortunately, Barnaby (“that devilish cat”) locates them just in time, and gives them to Granny.

After coloring the eggs and hiding them, Granny retires to await Easter Morning.  Meanwhile, Barnaby rolls the eggs down the entrance to the rabbit burrow hole where they hatch just in time for the children’s arrival.   Granny’s garden is now  “aflutter with peeping chicks, hopping rabbits, and giggling grandchildren.”

As for the extremely confused and frustrated Father Rabbit, he is left wondering if he actually is the Easter Bunny.

I loved reading the book to my granddaughter again this year.  She  laughed hysterically at the twists and turns of the plot — and her mother seemed to enjoy reading it to her again a few days later.  In past years, when my other adult children have been here for Easter, they enjoyed hearing their childhood favorite again, and in years to come I look forward to sharing the book with their children too.

I encourage you to seek out this lovely book and include it in your own springtime celebration.   The watercolor illustrations are lovely, and the characters memorable. You get two stories for the price of one, and every time you read the book, you (and the children) will find new details in the pictures that enhance the story even more.  Even the cover of this book is memorable.   Once children get to be about three or four years old they find it fascinating that Humbug Rabbit is reading a copy of Humbug Rabbit.

If your family has a favorite book for this time of year, please share it by using the comment section below.

(By the way, in my experience, if children believe in the Easter Bunny this book doesn’t shake their belief, and if they do not believe in the Easter Bunny they find the story even more hilarious.)

Another much loved Easter book, suggested by Barbara Malaspina, is The Golden Egg Book, first published in 1947.

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