Easter seemed to be a much bigger deal when I was younger.

Yes, I realize the importance of the holiday and probably appreciate the religious significance of it more than I did when I was younger.

But the whole dyed-eggs-Easter Bunny-baskets-full-of-candy part of it made it a little more fun.

When I was younger, the week before Easter my parents set aside an evening for dyeing eggs. They would buy a PAAS egg-dyeing kit and drop the colored capsules of dye into coffee mugs full of water.

The water would turn colors until each cup contained dark purples, reds or oranges.

After the eggs were done boiling, my brothers and I would gently place the egg on top of the wire dipper that came in the kit. We always decided single-colored eggs were too boring and tried to create designs with the wax crayon in the kit. We even tried to make the eggs multi-colored, but they would turn out looking a muddy orange instead of the purple and yellow combination we had intended.

Some of the eggs turned out well, but most were an ugly brown, or weren't left in the dye long enough to change the color much from white. They never looked like the eggs on the PAAS box. Those eggs held their color and had perfectly-drawn designs on them.

The dyed eggs at church looked better than ours. After Easter Mass when I was younger, some church members would bring in newborn chicks to the front of the church for the children to pet. The priest would invite all children to the front after Mass to see the chicks and take a dyed egg from the baskets up front. My brothers and I each took one back to my grandparent's house.

One year, we set them on the counter when and one of them rolled to the edge and down to the floor. One of my brothers burst into tears.

The combination of seeing the chicks at Mass and receiving an egg somehow led me to believe a chick would hatch from the purple-dyed egg I received at church.

I would casually bring up the "what if?" question to my parents and was given a rational explanation as to why a chick couldn't hatch from a store-bought egg that had been hard-boiled.

But I kept the egg on my desk at home. I would hope that in some sort of Easter miracle, a chick would hatch from that egg.

Deep down, I knew it couldn't happen. I knew that eventually that colored egg would be thrown out and I would move onto new interests, such as the end of the school year and summer.

But that belief in a little miracle is what made that holiday a bit more exciting.

Today, I don't dye eggs. I'll enjoy time with family this weekend and I will probably get a basket of candy for old time's sake.

And now, as an adult, I can focus on the real miracle of the Easter holiday.

Cari Quam can be reached at 434-2235 or by e-mail at :mailto:cari.quam@austindailyherald.com