As I am often wont to do on special holidays, my post is not always about tootling along a park path, but instead taking a stroll down Memory Lane. So, once again, today’s post will find me reflecting on some special memories from long-ago Easter Sundays.
If I close my eyes and time travel more than six decades ago, I can picture my mom belting out the song “Easter Parade” while she helped me get ready for Sunday School on Easter Sunday. She fiddled and fussed with my hair until she deemed it perfect, then plopped a hat upon that curly head. Those were not natural curls mind you, but the kind that came from having my wet hair set with bobby pins the night before … yep, pin curls were popular when I was a little girl, just the beginning of years of beauty rituals endured to “presenting your best face to the world” – ahh. Well thank you Mom for trying so hard!
This was me on Easter Sunday, circa 1963 – it was my 7th birthday and there were two big firsts that weekend: I got my first pair of eyeglasses, pale pink, cat-eye frames and I also got my first grown-up dress hat; I say “grown up” because it was the first hat that did not tie under the chin.
To be honest, neither of these “firsts” thrilled me and I pleaded to not wear my new glasses for this picture. My parents very seldom indulged in my youthful whims, so this plea was granted no doubt because it was my birthday. By the way, the squinting was because the sun was in my eyes, I assure you, not because I couldn’t see. 🙂
After Mom painstakingly arranged those curls just so, she jammed the hat on my head, handed me the white gloves and checked my knee socks were even. Satisfied with the result, this picture was taken and I was whisked off, next door to my best friend Linda Crosby’s house, where I accompanied her family to the local Presbyterian church for services. Mom did not drive and my father did not want to go to church, so through the years, I attended Sunday School services with a friend, no matter the denomination, even though I am Catholic.
As a youngster, many Sundays were spent at my maternal grandparents’ home in Toronto (Ontario). Easter Sunday dinner was always the traditional ham and trimmings and my grandmother’s dyed Easter eggs. I’ve written in the past about how Nanny saved onion peels for months, then boiled them up, threw the eggs in and hardboiled them in the brown water – well, they weren’t the prettiest Easter eggs, but we ate them and took some home to make egg salad sandwiches.
Easter memories … sweeter than a chocolate bunny.
At the beginning of this post I mentioned the song “Easter Parade” which you’ve no doubt heard before – if not, click here for the song from the 1942 movie “Holiday Inn” with crooner Bing Crosby.
Inevitably, at some point on this holiday, Nanny and Mom would begin reminiscing about leaving St. Helen’s church after Easter Sunday service, then walking to the waterfront at Sunnyside Park to participate in Toronto’s version of the Easter Parade. The ladies, all “dolled up” in their Easter finery, which of course included a hat, would stroll on that Boardwalk, arm-in-arm with their main squeeze and their children, similarly attired in their Sunday best. Depending on whether Easter was in March or April, those Easter clothes might have been covered up with a heavy coat and hopefully not snow boots, as the kids shivered with bare legs, i.e. the boys in short pants and the girls in white anklets. On those cold Easter Sundays, a pretty Easter bonnet might have been festive, but not guaranteed to keep their head warm.
I wish I had photos of Nanny and Mom strolling the boardwalk, long before I was around, but those memories recounted and Mom singing “Easter Parade” live on in the movie reels in my mind.
I will head out for my Easter Sunday stroll, but sans an “Easter bonnet with all the frills upon it” and opting instead for a wool hat because it is still cold here!
I might have chosen a frivolous Easter bonnet like this one, but the squirrels and birds at the Park would likely take off for parts unknown.
You may be curious about some of the photos. Since I had some fun for last year’s Easter post with Etsy bunny images, I searched their site for vintage Easter greetings where I discovered this trio of vintage photos at the Digital Art Gallery Etsy Shop.
Here is an Easter wish from me to you, just click the link below the purple hat.
Terri’s Challenge this week is the topic Earth Day, which I will be participating in next week.
Linda Schaub
WALKIN', WRITIN', WIT & WHIMSY 
A lovely read and a delightful card. Enjoy your day, Linda.
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Thank you Anne – I’m glad you enjoyed the post and Easter card. Same to you!
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I wish you to happy Easter Day 💞,Linda! Very interesting you sharing your 7th birthday celebration. So pretty looking in pink grown-up dress. So sweet Easter parade, Easter Sunday song. I watch video song. Beautiful Easter Card. I like. I send you a Easter Card. God bless you.
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Thank you Raj – same to you! I am a little late getting here as it got warm and sunny and I hated to come back inside. I’m glad you liked the card and the “Easter Parade” song.
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Welcome, Linda! Iam so happy. I enjoy your Easter parade “, Song it’s lovely song.
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Thank you for saying that Raj – Happy Easter!
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Happy Easter and hope you are wearing a bonnet
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Thank you Brian – same to you! I went walking for hours as it was a beautiful and sunny day and I never removed my boring-looking wool hat until I got home.
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What an adorable seven-year-old you were! I remember pin curls. 🙂 Your childhood notion of a grown-up hat is sweet even though some grownups do wear hats that tie under the chin. Thank you so much for the Easter wishes and many Easter blessings to you, Linda!
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Thank you Barbara! I always thought I looked much older than my seven years of age in this picture due to that coat, gloves and hat. 🙂 Funny you say that about the hats that tie because the pretty girl with Bing Crosby in the “Easter Parade” video had a hat with ties (although they were loose ribbon ties). I hope you had an enjoyable Easter with the grandchildren.
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🐣Happy Easter Sunday To Linda
I enjoyed waking to your post this morning. Thank you for the sweet purple flower hat Easter card!
It sounds to me that your mother loved on you while enjoyed herself by dressing you as if you were her little dolly! Curl pins, hats, gloves and all…
Your Nanny was ahead of her time with such an interesting way to create organic color Easter eggs! So perhaps this post could count for Earth Day post after all…
You are correct. I’ve never heard of 1942 movie “Holiday Inn” with Bing Crosby singing the Easter Parade. What a romanticize hoot!!
Your childhood Easter Days were certainly memorable for you. I just now boiled some eggs. Yorkie is color blind. So no need for onion peels or colorful dyes. You have motivated me to make a little good egg salad sandwich balanced by a little bad deviled eggs for us today. Delicatessens!
You made my day with that hat carefully considered for your park walk to visit your pet pals today. Hysterically Halarious! 🐣 However, I do believe that you are making a wiser decision to choose a more weather appropriate wool hat. Enjoy!
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Hi TD –
Happy Easter. I am glad you enjoyed this post. I always like taking a stroll down Memory Lane for holidays. Yes, my mom doted on me and made sure I looked picture perfect for church every Sunday, especially on Easter Sunday, even if it meant fiddling for hours with my hair only to plop a hat on it. I don’t recall if I always had a hat for church, but I do remember the white gloves.
My grandmother did her dyed eggs like this for years and I wrote a post about it once. They weren’t pretty, some were dark brown, others pale brown, but it worked for devilled eggs and plain hard-boiled eggs.
I never saw this movie, just remember my mom singing the song. There were two versions of the song, but I liked this one better as well as the horse and buggy scene in the video.
We were about 40 degrees this morning when I left to walk at the Park, then went to a larger park to walk and take photos, so I kept the wool hat on as it’s all open and was a little windy. I couldn’t resist buying and using this vintage photo of the woman with the egg carton hat.
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So is this where all the walking started, Linda? The Easter Parade?! Happy Easter to you. oxo
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Yes Pam – all these years I have kept it a secret! Happy Easter back at you! XOXO
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❤️
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Happy Easter!
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Same to you Kate!
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Happy Easter!
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Same to you Anne!
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Ahhh, I remember those pin curls well, though I had pushed them to the back of my mind. Wonderful memories, Linda. Happy Easter!
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Happy Easter Rebecca! Pin curls were a Saturday night ritual for many years. I am happy you can identify. 🙂 I thought they were awful to sleep in, then in later years with long hair I slept on plastic curlers as big as orange juice cans and then I had braces with TWO sets of headgear to boot … headgear going up and going back. Many the night I slept with my head hanging over the side of the bed, a memory I like to push to the back of my mind!
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Oh, the things we do for beauty! 🙂
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Yes, through the years but now it is nice to just slack off and be myself. 🙂
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And wear those flannel shirts. 🙂
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Yes, we both like them Rebecca!!
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I would have just turned 7 in the spring of 63 too. I remember the cotton gloves and the hats.
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Dawn, well we were prim and proper at the tender age of 7. I suggested to Mom that the pain of enduring pin curls, only to put a hat on top wasn’t a good idea, but it fell on deaf ears. 🙂
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I assume no chocolate bunnies were hoping about in the Park?
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No, I was bummed about that Wayne. Not even a real bunny. 🙂
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Love that hat and can imagine your mom fixing it just so – and very nice of her to yield about the glasses. Fun post – loved the creeative images and succinct memories – and of course the card
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Thanks Yvette – I’m glad you liked the card and the post. Mom did put a lot of effort into my appearance, especially for Sunday School and regular school too. I enjoyed looking at the vintage images at this Etsy Shop for a look back (including a “vintage me”).
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Wonderful post and greetings card, thank you! Happy Easter, Linda!
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Thank you Donna – I’m glad you enjoyed the post and the card. Every so often a holiday gives me the chance to stray off the park path a bit for a fun lookback. Happy Easter back at you!
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Happy Easter, Linda! Thank you for sharing the beautiful card. I wish I had a pretty floral bonnet to wear like that one. Your 7 year old picture is very cute and your mother did a great job with the curls.
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Thank you Esther! I hope you had a good Easter as well and I’m glad you liked the card. They made it look effortless to prepare an Easter bonnet, didn’t they? I hope you had some good photos alongside Teddy to make your Easter complete. Next year, you can do a full Easter Bunny post with him. 🙂
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Oh yes, that’s a great idea to do an Easter bunny post with him next year.
The card did look effortless and I didn’t know that the wreath would be the flower accessory on the bonnet. Very clever!
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That will be a fun post Esther. Buy some headband bunny ears for all four of you and do a family picture where you pose with Teddy and ask “will the real Easter Bunny please stand up, … er hop? Something fun like that.
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That’s a great idea! Thanks for the clever suggestion.
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You’re welcome! It will be fun to create that post. A couple of years ago, I collected all my bunny pics through the years and put them together into a blog post for Easter. We used to have more bunnies around clover time especially. Clover for us is right after the dandelions are done. We finally have dandelions here – a little color sure helps.
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Hope you had a wonderful weekend Linda 😉
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Thank you Sandra – it was nice for Easter, so I took a long walk and took a lot of pictures. 🙂
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A happy belated Easter wish to you! I remember those days, where everyone had a new outfit to look our best for church! Times have sure changed – the manufacturing plant my company contracts with was running all day Sunday, so I was working. I would rather have been home eating ham, Easter eggs and marshmallow chickies!
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Thank you JP … yes everyone got dressed up for Easter back then – what happened to that concept I wonder? That’s a shame you had to work on a holiday and were unable to spend Easter with your family. I hope you get a couple of extra days off as compensation for your efforts and you can have your Easter feast and treats then.
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Thank you for walking us down your memory lane. It is always so lovely to peek into other people’s lives from back when they were younger.
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Glad you enjoyed this post Ari. It’s always fun taking a step back in time and strolling down memory lane. I’m happy I took the time to digitize all the photo albums so I have pictures to accompany these wayback posts. Happy belated Easter to you!
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Yesterday I sent a message to my mom about how I loved Easter as a little girl because every year she bought me a new dress with a hat, gloves and new shoes then off to church. You look so cute in your picture. That was nice of your neighbor friend to go let you go with them every year.
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Diane, I think Easter was a bigger deal for getting dressed up years ago and thinking about the new outfit that we could hardly wait to wear to church, then to school once school resumed again. Thank you, I have a few other photos from other Easter Sundays, but none where I looked so prim and proper (and even mature) wearing a hat from years ago. My mom always asked my friends’ parents if they minded taking me along with them to church for Sunday school, so I actually went with them year-around. My mom didn’t drive and my father did not want to go to church, so this was our best way for me to attend church. When we moved to the States, I had a friend across the street whose family was Baptist, so soon I was attending Sunday school with her and even joined Pioneer Girls (like Brownies and Girl Scouts only a big religious).
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How nice you were able to go with your friends to church. It’s always fun to get away from our parents and spend it with friends.
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Yes, they were nice to take me with them. My mom was insistent that I go to Sunday School I went to Sunday church services with my grandmother a few times when we went to visit her, but then it was difficult for her to walk up the hill so we stopped. The church was at the top of her street, a steep incline to walk for her.
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Oh the white gloves! I cannot imagine why my mother ever had me wear those. No doubt they were irredeemably filthy after about ten minutes. Your Easter outfit and curls are cute.
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Thank you Eilene – yes white gloves are impractical, unless you are doing the “white glove test. I wonder if little girls wear the gloves now?
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Such a cute e-card!
I feel your pain. I also started wearing glasses at age seven. As far as I was concerned at the time, it was a fate worse than death.
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Glad you liked the e-card!
I also thought it was a fate worse than death Linda. I walked to school with my friends who knew about the dreaded glasses, but as soon as I got to school and settled in class, I took them off and quickly wrapped adhesive tape around the frame (at the hinge) pretending they were broken and thus I couldn’t wear them like that. Clever, or so I thought. 😉
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I see a VW Beetle behind in the photo you that brought back memories of my dads red Beetle in the 60s, now such a classic.
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Yes, they were a classic – the first VW Beetles. We did a lot of traveling in this car, making one round trip from Ontario, Canada to California (which was 2,500 miles/3,995 kilometers EACH WAY) and another a round trip to Oklahoma, half the mileage, both in mid-Summer, with no air conditioning and plastic-covered car seats. 🙂
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Hoping you had a lovely Easter with or without a bonnet to wear. Pink cat-eye frames were all the rage but my mother insisted I get gray frames. I didn’t mind seeing clearly with the glasses, but the frame color was a bummer.
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I did have a nice Easter Sunday stroll with a wool hat and wearing gloves as it was chilly, but it warmed up a lot by the time I came home. Same as today – I was overdressed and removing layers as the day wore on; we went from chilly to 80 this past few days, completely bypassing Spring once again and it is just wrong. That’s good you didn’t mind your glasses Ally; I didn’t like mine at all, but it was a silent rebellion. I see toddlers wearing eyeglasses now. I don’t think that was happening back when I got glasses.
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You looked so cute in your red coat and grown-up Easter hat, Linda! 🙂 I enjoyed reading your Easter reminiscences and the Jacquie Lawson card is lovely. Toronto still has an Easter parade, but I’ve only seen bits of it on the local news.
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Thank you Debbie! I always thought the hat and coat made me look older than my tender age of seven, so I’m glad I didn’t have to wear the cat-eye glasses too. 🙂 I guess Sunnyside was a hoppin’ place back in the day with strolling on the boardwalk and I think it would be second only to the Easter Parade in New York.
I was in New York for Easter break in 1976 for a school-related event and so we were there for Easter Sunday morning. We went to and watched their Easter Parade and they really got dressed up fancy.
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Times have really changed. I used to but my girls Eater dresses when they were young, but they had no interest in Easter hats. Now I don’t even think my grandkids get special Easter outfits.
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Ruth, I keep hearing that Halloween is catching up with Christmas as far as decorations and holiday festivities, food, etc. I find it difficult to believe that Easter is not in second place, but I guess it is now mostly about the Easter goodies, not as much getting dressed up for church services and spending time with loved ones. I always thought the hat and coat in this photo made me look too old for my age.
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And not so much about the resurrection. Sad!
Yes, you did look older in the coat and hat.
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No, people seem to have forgotten the reason for celebrating Easter (Christmas too for that matter). Those holy holidays have become too commercialized in my opinion.
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Agreed.
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Even honoring the Pope … in the line for those to pay their respects, people were stopping to take selfies with the Pope in his coffin in the background, even though the guards were standing there.
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I heard about that. Personally, I think it’s disgusting.
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I think it is disgusting too Ruth – people have no sense of decency anymore, not to mention reverence for the deceased, let alone the Pope.
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Oh my! We had the same torture done to us at Easter lol. We also got new outfits, hats, gloves included 😁
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It was a “thing” back then, tradition and then we wore our new clothes the first day back at school after Easter holiday. I think that nicety has fallen by the wayside though.
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I wish it would come back. Everyone is so casual now. I love seeing men in suits and women in dresses or skirts. I wear a lot of skirts in the summer.
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I remember when casual days at work became a “thing” as I had worked in the Downtown Business District for many years, where the businessmen were usually in three-piece suits every day and even pants suits for women were a no-no, as were bare arms in dresses. I liked getting dressed up for work back in the day.
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So did I. I still have a couple of suits from my work era!
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I’m having a difficult time getting rid of my clothes as I liked wearing them. I used to like buying clothes and accessories. The last 13 years of my work life, I worked from home, so it didn’t matter what I was wearing. 🙂
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