by Tyler English
While the other shoppers at Target loaded their baskets with cleaning supplies, groceries and toiletries, my roommate, Kasey Mathews, and I decided to spend an extra few minutes on our shopping trip to put together a surprise Easter Basket Hunt for our house.
Instead of stocking up on toilet paper, we stocked up on chocolate rabbits and pastel-colored eggs. Bags of jelly beans replaced the bags of frozen vegetables other shoppers were purchasing.
While we were also shopping for essentials, Kasey and I knew that back home we were stocked up on disinfectant clothes and other cleaners. Keeping stock of our supplies and groceries became second nature once the COVID-19 outbreak hit Rochester.
We live in a duplex with a total of eight college students staying in one household. The outbreak forcing us all to stay under one roof for such a long period of time changed the dynamic of the house. Limited contact with the outside world and washing out hands every thirty minutes became our new day-to-day.
Not only were we stuck inside, but we were trapped with each other. Needless to say: tensions rose and stress levels escalated.
In times of stress we would lean on our families for support, however quarantine made travel impossible. Saddened by the inability to visit our families and loved ones my roommate and I decided to hold our own family Easter dinner and have a surprise egg and basket hunt.
We planned it perfectly. We asked everyone to cook their own dish that they would like to eat at Easter and told them that we would be serving a traditional ham to give them a little taste of home. Planning the evening was a piece of cake compared to the real challenge: determining what to put in everyone’s baskets.
Our limited budgets and determination to make each basket special proved especially difficult. As college students spare cash to burn on tiny trinkets and bunny ears is hard to come by so we have to get creative.
The first basket we finished was for our plant-obsessed environmental science major roommate. Two small grass growing pots with shark and unicorn characters on them, both befitting of his personality accompanied his chocolate rabbit.
We were able to complete three baskets in the board game section. Filling one with an expansion of a card game based on memes, one with a set of role playing dice and another with a game that they had always wanted, we were halfway done with our quest.
Two baskets came together in the housewares section. String lights and a lavender essential oil filled the basket of our housemate who has been waiting to decorate their room and a new candle and some chapstick for the housemate who just burned through the last of their assorted wax.
The remaining baskets belonged to me and another housemate who are avid readers. Naturally, the books section filled our baskets so we grabbed The Giver and The Outsiders.
With our special items in tow, some candies and chocolate rabbits my roommate and I were proud of our haul. That was until it dawned on us that two of the eight people we are buying for can’t eat chocolate. We scrambled to find replacements for them as we still wanted them to have a larger snack item in their baskets. After wandering the grocery aisles we finally landed on energy bars and some spicy crackers for them as they are both avid runners and snackers.
The gesture may not have been the largest but what meant the most was spending a holiday together with all those in our house. It helped to remind us that in our times of stress we are one household and we are there for each other, and at the end of the day we are still kids who can have some fun now and then.
