– Time For A Tiara: Column by Ginna Young – - Look at that ugly mug, will you?

– Time For A Tiara: Column by Ginna Young –

By Ginna Young

Lately, when I have a moment or two, I clean out boxes, drawers and cupboards, getting rid of anything rusted, broken or no longer useful. If I run across anything sentimental, I put that in a different pile; I’m not ready to deal with that this time of year, with graduations right around the corner. My emotions are too quick to jump to the surface.

No, this is purely a “toss junk” project I’m on. For example, I went through the coffee mugs and realized I only wanted to keep three of them that are nicer. A bunch were just stuck in the back of one of the kitchen cupboards – over-sized, ugly things, with inspirational wording on them, which I hate.

As I held one in my hand, looking at it with disgust, I wondered why we had all these in the first place. Then, it dawned on me. For coloring eggs, of course!

Each year, we’d raid the cupboard, grabbing whatever coffee mugs we could find, to dye the eggs. Every year, Mom would complain that the cups stained and wouldn’t come clean after we did the eggs, so we went to the dollar store and bought a whole bunch of mugs we didn’t like, just for dying eggs, so we wouldn’t feel bad when we ruined them.

We’d start by heating water to boiling, pouring the coffee cup about 3/4 of the way with the scalding water, then adding a few drops of food coloring, before slipping in the eggs.

Naturally, we always filled the cups just a little too full and the water would run over. Since we put apple cider vinegar in the bottom, prior to adding the water (supposedly, it sets the color better), you can imagine how good that smelled. Not to mention, the colored water stained what it touched and was, well, HOT!

I’d like to say that the larger cups did away with that hazard, which was the plan, but we never seemed to learn and still filled the mugs way too full. After we’d get it cleaned up, the eggs were ready to be revealed.

Sometimes, we’d get lucky and the colors would be spectacular – robins egg blue, spring green, sunny yellow, lavender, magenta, you name it. A few times, even though we didn’t try, the colors we got were even better than what was planned.

A reddish orange turned out looking like a tomato, too much red and green produced a realistic looking brown chicken egg. Other times, the colors were a major failure and drew a chorus of eeeewwwws.

I’ll never forget the one that was supposed to be a gorgeous chartreuse and instead, turned out to look like calf scours. Hideous, I’m telling you!

Some of my favorites were eggs that cracked when they hit the water and if you used more than one color, a shade would concentrate in that crack, while the rest of the egg was the desired hue. I loved those, because they looked like a rock formation or lightning bolts; I called them Frankenstein eggs.

And if you believe that the egg cracked in the hot water, and not when I accidentally dropped it into the water and it hit the bottom of the cup, then I have some swamp land I can sell you.

Anyway, the funniest one that ever came out of the dying, was a Pepto Bismol-colored egg. It wouldn’t have been so bad looking, but we decided it needed spots, so, we cut up a dish sponge, dropped a few spots of red color on that and applied it to the surface of the egg.

Well, the spots didn’t come out round, so it made the egg look like it had chicken pox. That was a learning lesson, one we did not repeat.

We never ate our eggs after we colored them, we liked to admire them for months, so we kept them in egg cartons until they started smelling a little funny.

All of that came back as I was holding the over-sized mug in my hand. It came to me, then, that I could relive those beloved memories by dying eggs this year. I have vinegar in the cupboard, food coloring, a carton of eggs not earmarked for anything and the aforementioned mugs, still stained from years before.

That thought lasted half a second, before I decided I really don’t want the hassle of dying eggs and tossed the mugs in the garbage can. My memories are a lot less messy that actually coloring eggs!