Note: I'm posting this a day before actual Ostar, but it's written as though it were after. Since the holiday fell on the 20th that year, a Friday, so I suppose I'm pretending that it's the 23rd, now.-D.
Happy Ostar!
This year, for the first time that I know of, we had an Ostar activity involving artificially colored eggs hidden by humans. It was Steve's doing, though I helped.
The issue is that little Sean lives here now, and while he's too young to really care one way or the other, his parents wanted a kid-friendly holiday activity and the rest of us decided to make it happen. It's not like their little family gets much in the way of light-hearted normality.
We invited all the sprouts--Ostar fell on a Friday, so the older ones had to take off school to come, but most of them did, including my nephews and niece (my brother and sister-in-law are really getting quite enlightened about this sort of thing). In fact, the only ones who didn't come were Alexis and Billie (Sarah Grimm's youngest), since they're both twelve and say they're getting too old for this sort of thing. And then, Ostar morning, while Charlie's egg-hunt (a search for the nests of actual breeding animals) went on as normal, the sprouts and their associated adults (including me) did our own thing.
It didn't seem right to me to just hide and then seek pastel-dyed chicken eggs, not on campus, and not in this company--there needed to be some kind of improvisation on the theme, some way of bringing more natural history into it. In fact, I'd initially approached Charlie about including the kids in the adult hunt, but he just growled that I must want the privacy of the birds invaded by dozens of squealing children. Which seemed a little unfair and most of them are either his relatives or mine, and I like to think we teach our families how to act, but perhaps he had a point.
"Anyway," he added, "I thought the whole point was to do something Sean can enjoy?"
So, what we did was to make mock-ups, using wood and paint, of the eggs of six different locally breeding birds (most of which are not breeding yet), a dozen eggs of each. "We," in this case, means me, Steve, Alexis, Billie, Aidan, and J.T., who is the grandson of John Crain, the new treasurer I don't think I've talked about yet. We did it last Sunday, made a little egg-assembly-line, while John himself, who is a fair artist, painted wooden cut-outs of each bird species standing near a nest of eggs and labeled with its name in large lettering. He also made another set of bird cut-outs without eggs.
Then, Ostar morning, we hid all the eggs in the garden and lawn in front of the Mansion and set up both sets of cut-outs--the ones without eggs pictured we attached next to buckets and the ones with eggs we set up in a line out of sight of the first group.
The idea was that the children should not only find the eggs but also put each found egg in the bucket for the right species. They could consult the other set of cut-outs for reference, but had to remember which egg went with which bird at least long enough to run from the reference to the buckets.
So, first they ran around finding the eggs (Sean had a good deal of coaching from his mother, and he held her hand because he has only just started walking and is not steady on his feet) with baskets in hand, and then, in a second stage, they sorted their finds into buckets (Sean didn't really do that part) and then they all got candy and then we all went to lunch.
The weather was warm and somewhat gray, the first Ostar I've had here when there was no snow, nor hint of snow, nor remnants of snow, but actual, springlike, warmth.
Lunch was a giant feast organized mostly around eggs and also the last of last year's potatoes, for the vegans. And afterwards we had actual, springlike, drizzling rain all afternoon, and we all gathered in the Great Hall for the slide show of the pictures from Charlie's egg-hunt and the awarding of the prizes (this time a pair of three-dimensional wooden puzzles that, when fully assembled, formed giant eggs--and when partially disassembled revealed that the chicks in question were velociraptors).
And I felt really torn. On the one hand, I had a lot of fun, planning and executing the children's hunt, and sitting watching the slide show with my niece, Ruthie, in my lap was pure, heart-bursting, sweetness. On the other hand....
After the slide show, I stayed behind with some of the novices to help Charlie clean up, and he approached me.
"So, how did it go?" he asked. I shrugged.
"It went well," I told him. "The kids had a lot of fun, and the egg-sorting thing worked. I'm really pleased by how it all went. But.... I wish I could have helped with the main egg-hunt. I guess I miss it."
Charlie looked at me for a few seconds.
"If it helps," he said, "remember that whenever you do something you learned from me, I'm with you."
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