A Star Wars Easter

I will have all the pictures and the cute, gory details of Easter up here in a few days, but I would be amiss to not take a few minutes before bed to speak to the ridiculousness of the Star Wars egg dying kit. I don't remember who makes it, but they know who they are. The color pellets were fine. Who can mess up colored powder? The problem came post coloring, once dried in the tear out rings. There were two kits. One Star Wars and one jungle. Ben takes off with the jungle, sticking elephants and trees one on top of another on his eggs. Having dipped a few myself and far too mature for cartoon monkeys, I searched for the Star Wars sticker page to get an Ewok to accent my dual color dye job. Here is the thing. They weren't stickers. After trying and failing to peel them off, I realized that they were something similar to a tattoo type contraption, with the sticky under a solid sheet of plastic. Okay, I think, just stick and rub. So I lay the plastic against the egg and scratch with the stick provided in the kit. Nothing. Thinking that one may have just been a dud, I pick a new one. I scratch longer and firmer. Nothing. Now my dad takes a turn. He thinks hotter and so holds it under his thumb and gets a sliver of one to stick. Now we are one to something. Tina tries a cloth with hot water which brought us back to no cigar and then I come up with the brilliant idea of hair dryer. Out she comes and on it turns, burning my fingers as they try to hold the rubbing against the egg. After two tries and charred skin, Dad suggests heating the egg or perhaps heating the rubbing first. Maybe dryer. Maybe wetter. Maybe it shouldn't take this much effort to figure out how to use something that is made for 5 years olds and costs $2.99. The best part is that here, where you expect me to come to the part of the story where we finally figure it out, you'll have to settle for disappointment. We never did figure out how to get the Wookie on the egg or any of his other Tatooine cohorts for that matter. They are all on the plastic, just as they came. Perhaps the duds of the batch. The inevitable lemon from the factory. But I like to think that it wasn't a dud. I like to think of families all over this country, sitting with sticks and that confounded piece of plastic wondering how in the world it is that they can't manage to stick R2D2 to an egg and feeling just that much dumber for it. I like to imagine the man whose worked 20 years packing egg decoration kits and one night over drinks thought "You know what would be funny...". The man who had the wherewithal to see a joke to the end. The man who is laughing now as I type, picturing me with my stick and wet towel and hairdryer. The man I tip my hat to. He got me. He got us all. And though not the legacy I would have picked, a legacy all the same.