Next week should be the big egg week, the week the chickens work overtime. But if I am to believe all the bird-flu news, these haggard hens have already been on time and a half – the struggling survivors of the national virus. They should probably create a hens’ union and demand to be paid for piecework.

And if I were one of those hard-working hens, I’d be furious that all the credit for my Easter week output goes to a giant pink rabbit. I wonder how that started anyway – the holiday candy and eggs being delivered by the Easter Bunny? I guess it’s not practical to apply common sense to old childhood traditions.

Easter eggs have always been much more fun to color here than in Massachusetts where I grew up. Back then, the local layers were Rhode Island Reds, so all the eggs of my youth were brown. Tasty? Yes. Good for dying pink, yellow or lavender? Nope. Obviously, the Cape Cod Easter Bunny didn’t mind dark green, burgundy, or mottled blue/brown eggs. We colored ugly ones by the dozen, but we didn’t know the difference. Pastel eggs only existed in magazines.

We New England kids simply didn’t understand that we were geographically deprived.

I had a reasonably normal childhood, but I never saw a white egg until I was an adult. It was my first breakfast in California and I watched with wonder as the diner’s short-order cook reach into a bowl of white eggs to make my omelet. By then, my egg coloring days were well behind me.

Years passed, and when my daughter was little, we lived in Connecticut, back in brown egg territory. White eggs magically appeared in area stores about two weeks before Easter – at a premium price – and then disappeared for another year.

You can imagine then, how incredulous I was the first Easter I spent with my husband’s family in Rochester.

My mother-in-law, raised on a German-speaking farm in the Buffalo area, boiled her white Easter eggs with onion skins … to dye them brown. When I asked her if she colored them for Easter, she replied, “I just did. Don’t you dye your eggs at Easter?” When I told her our New England eggs were already brown, she didn’t believe me. “No, all eggs are white… except robins’ eggs which are blue.”

I couldn’t tell her. And I guess it really didn’t matter – the lady made a splendid, Easter lamb cake covered with coconut.

Years later, we moved to Pennsylvania, also white egg country. OK. I accepted that all eggs were white until the day I saw brown eggs for sale – at a premium. I stood in the dairy section and laughed.

When my granddaughter, the Princess of Boston, first visited us at Easter time, she was two. We created an egg decorating station on the kitchen island. Early on, she loved the color pink, but back in 2007, like Picasso, she had a blue period. Within the first five minutes of rolling and dipping, the toddling Princess was stripped of her newly-blue shirt and pants. By the time the dozen white eggs were transformed into wet pastels, she was down to a diaper and was barefoot. The kid was covered with indigo blotches, including hair, teeth, and toes. She looked ready to join the cast of The Smurfs.

The day after that Easter was, as usual, egg salad time with the Easter eggs. When I peeled the Princess’s royal blue beauties, the whites were distinctly blue-tinged, but I plunged ahead anyway … foolishly. The resulting combination of yellow yokes, Smurf-colored whites, and a double-smidge of Hellman’s produced light green egg salad.

Adding the chopped celery only complimented the color. Ugh! Even a reading of Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham couldn’t convince the family that my egg salad was edible. Personally, I had no trouble enjoying it after I hid it between lettuce leaves and slices of pumpernickel.

This year the challenge of coloring eggs for young families isn’t choosing between brown or white eggs. It’s choosing which credit card can handle the purchase. If I thought the farmers were making a good profit from this, I wouldn’t mind the filet mignon pricing for eggs. Maybe the new chicks on the block will be in full production.

I do wish I had little ones to color and decorate with again. I’d stir up dipping bowls of rabbit ear pink, baby chick yellow, and of course, Smurf blue … oh, and maybe a tall jug of Bloody Mary Red. After all, Easter decorating is supposed to be eggs-citing!

Eggs-cellent.

Marcy O’Brien writes from her home in Warren, Pa.