Green Onion Egg Salad / Hunger Easter Egg Games

We have our own Easter traditions in Cajun Country. One of the most beloved traditions is paqueing eggs on Easter Day.

It’s a very simple game that can quickly get out of hand. It’s simply trying to crack your opponent's Easter egg with your Easter egg till you are the last egg standing. You really see people’s personalities by the end of the game. Within 15 minutes a couple of us have given up and wandered off and a few are half-heartedly still trying but not with much determination. Then there are the competitive ones. The ones hoarding eggs they think are the hardest. My middle child is one of these. She even tried to sneak in a stone egg one year. They celebrate the win as if they just won gold in the Olympics, walking around gloating while holding their egg in the air as if was anointed by God.

My PawPaw had a whole different game he liked to play. It was less a game and more like a "Game of Thrones" situation. Most of my cousins and I didn’t grow up in wealth by any stretch so any offer of money was taken very seriously. My PawPaw would tell us there was one egg with $10 in it - a relative fortune to us. Here we are, all squeaky clean in our Sunday Best. The first group photo was a collection of smiling, shiny kids all polished up to look nice for the special day. All of this changed quickly when my PawPaw released us to the hunt.

This was a hunt like we are fighting for the last food in the forest. No one was safe. The first part was for the eggs. Then one cousin would realize why search for eggs when you can steal them? Then it became an all-out war for survival. Nothing was off the table. Tackling, biting, tripping, secret warfare. You named it we did it. By the end, we looked like we had all participated in some sort of bloody cage match. Imagine the “Hunger Games of Easter Eggs”. The craziest part of all this was not one damn time did we get $10. PawPaw would say “I guess you didn’t find it”. If we were smarter we would have realized that since our PawPaw was the cheapest man to ever live, it would be a cold day in hell before he parted with $10. J

Jolie Meaux