My Easter Dress

A scary thing happens in the spring of the year. It's part cultural, a little vanity, and completely female in origin. When the weather starts to warm up and the flowers start to peep out of the ground, the Easter Ensemble rears it's frightening head. Trust me when I say that this bunny has fangs.

The Easter Ensemble Phenomenon is a matter of genetics. In other words, women are powerless to resist. Be drab and colorless for the rest of the year, but fail not to scour the retail countryside for the right Easter outfit. For women, it's a lifelong burden.

As a guy, I pretty much cleared the Ensemble hurdle at about age twelve. Fashion trends pose no threat to a guy with no fashion statement to make. In other words, I've worn the same ratty Easter suit for almost twenty years. Then I got married and had three daughters. That's when I realized that the bunny not only had fangs, but it has rabies, too.

In the early years, it was simply a matter of dressing the girls up in pastel to mark the occasion. And then this year, my wife got her second wind and decided that I needed to join in on the Ensemble fun. It caught me completely off guard.

"Look what I bought the girls for Easter," she gushed as she returned from a slash and burn shopping mission. With that, she whipped out a set of dresses that looked like an explosion in a paint factory. And she topped it off by tossing a matching jacket and pants in my lap.

My hormones, which have been sorely challenged over the last decade of female dominance, gyrated right and left and then scattered like cowards. The suit was a concoction of pink, blue, and pistachio colored flowers that would stop any self-respecting male in his tracks.

To make it worse, all the little girls were gathered around ooohing and aaaahing like they had just seen the Easter Bunny in person or something. I almost had a spell of the vapors right there and then.

But I've learned a little something over the last ten years. So instead of panicking and making a typically stupid male remark, I resorted to a levelheaded male strategy. "I really like it, I do. But I'm not sure that it will match the truck." It was a bold, but necessary move given my position as a card carrying Y chromosome holder.

It caught her off guard initially, but she recovered. "Oh, what do you mean?"

"Well, I've been thinking and I've decided to paint the pickup a nice shade of fuchsia with some pretty gold trim. It will match the carpet in the bedroom much better. But I'm afraid this suit will clash." I was way out there on this one, but I didn't blink an eye.

"Mmm," she thought out loud. "I hadn't thought about that. But you have a point there. A fuchsia truck would also match the cushions on the sofa. I guess I could take the suit back."

"Gee, that's too bad," I said genuinely. "You were on the right track, though."

It was a narrow escape for me and my hormones. We dodged a real bullet this year. And for the twenty-first year in a row, I was able to wear my same old ratty Easter suit. The paint job on the truck cost me a fortune, but I consider it money well wasted. Itâ