I love it when a plan comes together....

Egg Hunt


A month or so ago we at the library learned that a local civic service club would no longer be holding its longstanding annual Easter egg hunt at the city park on the day before Easter. We put our heads together and decided that the library should try holding a replacement event. So we ordered a job lot of plastic eggs with candy (There are online vendors that specialize in such things), got some items to serve as door prizes, and began publicizing the event. We had enough pre-registrations to suggest that we could look forward to a good turnout.

The day before the hunt we had our yard mowed. Only the day before that, the Board of Trustees had authorized me to start paying somebody to mow the yard regularly. Our previous librarian’s husband had been the head of the city’s outdoor maintenance crew. Whenever she needed any yard work done, she could call him and have it taken care of promptly.

Then they both retired, and I’ve never had anything like as close a relationship with his successor. As the city’s work force shrank due to budget issues, it became more and more difficult to get them to work on our yard. Last year they said that they would stop helping us altogether. The Board finally accepted that reality just in the nick of time to let us get ready for Saturday’s hunt.

We normally have three staff members on duty on Saturday. Also, I, after working a normal Monday through Friday week, normally come in for a couple of hours on Saturday. This Saturday we had one staff member scheduled to be off. Since one must always be available to staff the circulation desk, that left two of us to manage the event. We had another staff member who promised to come in on her day off to help with the door prize drawing, and a reliable community service worker who said he would be there.

On Saturdays we come in an hour before the library’s usual opening time. This gives us time to work on tasks that might be awkward to do while patrons are present. This Saturday our number one task before opening was hiding Easter eggs. To one end of the building we have a large, open area with grass and a grove of tall shade trees. We hid the eggs there. Some were placed around the bases of the trees. Some went in the shrubs and hedges on that end of the building. Some were simply scattered around the lawn. We finished hiding the eggs just in time to open for business.

Our community service worker arrived on schedule and was put to work making and bagging popcorn. I did not recall our planning to have refreshments during our planning sessions. The last-minute decision to make popcorn was not really a problem in itself. We had a good worker on hand to do it, it was for an outdoor event, and there was plenty of popcorn left over from a previous outdoor event two weeks ago.

The problem came when I asked what plans had been made to supply Easter egg hunters with water outside. Nobody had thought about that. I pointed out that giving people salty popcorn on a hot day without also supplying water was asking for trouble. The large water coolers that we had used at the event two weeks previously had been placed in off-site storage, where we could not access them at a moment’s notice. One worker ran to Wal-Mart to get a pair of smaller coolers that we could use.

For a while it appeared that our supply of extension cords had also been swept up into the off-site storage unit. We had no way of getting power to the popcorn machine’s location near the egg hunt area. A call to the staff member who had planned the last outdoor event revealed that she had stored the cords in the building. We were now able to find them and get the corn popping.

While one worker ran the circ desk, and the other held story time in the library’s Periodical Room, I put ice and water in the new coolers and took them outside. I also brought out a trash can and a table for refreshments. And I took a clutch of small surveyor’s flags and marked out the perimeter of the Easter egg search area. This would help parents to keep children away from the road, out of the woods, away from the rose bushes, etc.

While I was in the midst of these preparations, I was given a pair of gold-colored eggs and told to hide them. The finders of the gold eggs would win door prizes. I hid them in two widely-separated spots, to try to make sure that one child did not manage to find both.

A few minutes before the hunt was scheduled to begin, I did a quick count of popcorn bags to try to determine whether we had enough. I decided to have one more batch popped for good measure, thinking that we would have just enough time to do this and still move the extension cord. It turned out that I miscalculated by a few minutes. A surge of children and parents passed into the side yard and started scarfing up Easter eggs. Fortunately nobody fell afoul of the tripping hazard posed by the cord.

I was still busy around the popcorn machine when I heard my name called. Somebody had spotted a snake. We had seen no sign of any snakes earlier, when we had gone all over the yard hiding Easter eggs. I headed for the telltale ring of spectators, half-expecting to find a harmless grass snake. But no, this was serious-looking snake—perhaps four feet long, and correspondingly big around.

Ordinarily I take a live-and-let-live approach to snakes. A snake in the middle of fifty or so Easter egg hunters was not something that could just be ignored. I ran to the utility room to get a garden hoe. As I came back with my weapon, I saw one of the daddies carrying the snake’s limp remains into the woods. He had found a stick and dealt with it. The excitement over, everybody went back to Easter egg hunting. Some hunters in other parts of the yard seem not even to have noticed the snake.

It did not take long for the crowd to pick the yard clean of eggs. They all headed inside for the prize drawing. A moment later, they headed back out. It seems that only one of the gold eggs had been found. I suppose I hid it a little too well. At any rate, the children got to a have a short, but exciting, second egg hunt. Then everybody went back inside.

I stayed outside with our community service worker to clean up. There was remarkably little of that to do. I literally found only a single handful of bits of discarded wrapping plastic. There was also a bit of popcorn to gather up near the popcorn machine. Not a single popcorn bag or plastic eggshell had been abandoned. I was quite proud of our little Easter egg hunters and their parents. While cleaning up, I had two small bags of popcorn for a belated breakfast.

I retrieved the surveyor’s flags for re-use. We hauled everything back inside. The crowd had by now thinned out. The workers told me that the door prize event had gone very smoothly. We had 20 bags of popcorn left. That final popping had been unnecessary after all. I placed two bags with my book bag to take home. No doubt the staff could find good homes for the rest of the leftovers.

After we had all congratulated each other on a good job, I wished everybody a happy Easter and headed home. I got there around noon. Since I planned to treat myself to a meal out that evening, I made the popcorn I’d brought home serve for lunch.

Planning special library events is always a somewhat nervous business. There are so many things that can go wrong! This is even more the case when the event is for children, and still more when it takes place outside. All things considered, the Easter egg hunt went beautifully. Everybody seemed to have a good time, and there were no problems beyond a couple of minor miscalculations, and a snake too dumb to tell plastic eggs from the rear thing. It had been a good day’s work.

Reads better than any action movie, congrats on an eggcellent event!