Why the Easter Bunny Wears a Top Hat

by Barb in Key West where it’s c-c-c-old (64 degrees)

In the reader letter at the end of “Hopped Along,” my novella in Easter Basket Murder, released last Tuesday, I explain why my Easter Bunny wears a top hat.

I know why my Easter Bunny wears a top hat and tails. It comes from one of my favorite stories told by my father. When he was small, maybe five or six, he heard a noise outside just after dawn on Easter morning. Hoping to catch the Easter Bunny in the act of leaving the basket, he got out of bed and sat at the top of the stairs. Through the transom over the door, he was thrilled to see a top hat bobbing down the front walk. When the door to the house started to open, he lost his nerve and darted back to bed.

I don’t know how many years later it was that my father figured out that he’d seen the top of his father’s head as his parents returned at dawn from a formal party. But after my dad witnessed that scene through the transom, he said forever after he pictured the Easter Bunny wearing a top hat, and thus I do, too.

I especially loved this story because my father wasn’t given to mythologizing his childhood–or telling many stories about it at all. I adored his parents. As a teenager in the 1960s, their tales of the 1920s, beaded dresses and bathtub gin, where entrancing to me. I spent a lot of time with them and their colorful assortment of friends–millionaires, gigolos, B-to-D list celebrities, gay couples. All people who were kind and lovely to me. My grandparents were wonderful in an Auntie Mame-ish sort of way. Now that I’m older I can see that while that was great for grandparents, maybe it wasn’t the greatest for parents. Returning at dawn from a party on Easter Sunday may be emblematic of my father’s almost-never-spoken-about reservations about his upbringing.

As it happens, I still have that top hat, still in its original packaging. I have no idea why my grandparents saved it or why my parents saved it when it came to them or why I’m saving it except that having lasted this long…

The label on the box says it was deliverd C.O.D. to R. M. Ross for $9.94 to 38 Westminster Court in New Rochelle, NY, on December 22, (unfortunately no year). My father’s family, which included his mother’s father, lived at that address in the 1930s. By the mid-thirties when my father would have been old enough to have observed the hat bouncing down the front walk, the days of flappers and bathtub gin were over. Neither my grandfather, who was stockbroker, nor my great-grandfather, who had worked in my grandmother’s family’s interior design business, was working. (Neither profession is built to withstand economic downturns.) The only income coming in would have been from my grandmother, who worked at Saks Fifth Avenue. She eventually became a millinery buyer, but in those years she may have been behind a counter selling hats.

Paying $9.94 for a top hat during the Depression must have been an indulgence. On the other hand, having the chance to go to a fancy party and recapture a bit of your younger years must have been irresistible.

Inside the hatOriginal tissue paperBack of the sales slip above

I love that R.H. Macy’s, however diminished, is still at Herald Square. Given the many evolutions and revolutions in retail in the last 90 years, it seems like a miracle.

So now you know why my Easter Bunny wears a top hat.

Readers: Does your Easter Bunny wear a top hat? Do you have a tale from a parent’s or grandparent’s youth that you treasure? Tell us about it.