I’m going to be in New York City, with my son just up from college and his roommate as a house guest. It will be fun. My son will invite his childhood friend Perry over as soon as he gets in, and soon three boys will be lounging in my son’s room watching movies on TV and I’ll be happy because it will be just like old days. There are big flowers on the bureau as you open the front door, and they’re surrounded by chocolate bunnies and chocolate eggs in bright colored wrapping. When my son comes home from school this is what he does: he goes into his room, lies down on the bed, takes a cellphone in one hand and the TV clicker in the other, and remains prone for 24 hours. He will at some point call 3 Guys Diner down the street and order cheeseburgers or spaghetti. This I think is his favorite thing in the world to do. On Sunday we will all go to lunch with Perry’s parents, and his sister Alexandra, my goddaughter. We will go to one of our favorite restaurants in the neighborhood. We’ll all catch up. I’ll be very happy to see us together and it will remind me of when the boys were 5 and 10 and 15. Sunday morning I’m going to go down to midtown, to the NBC studios at mighty Rockefeller center, to be on the panel on Meet the Press. We’re going to talk about the Obama speech, which i found impressive. Then mass. On Good Friday I’m having dinner with old friends from CBS days and their son Nick, who just got accepted to every great public high school in the city, so we’re going to celebrate. On Saturday Jim Karas, once my trainer, now my friend, and who runs a great gym if you’re in Chicago, is in town, and we’re going to walk in the Park. I can’t think of anything else. I’m just going to walk a lot whenever I can.

Everyone in Mustique is transformed into a child on Easter or else blown away. You have to imagine the scene, white velvety beaches kept clean mysteriously the way stage sets are, lots of different kinds of beaches but all of them sweet for wild and gleeful children. Macaroni Beach, famous to all beach lovers, can have big waves for body surfing on other days but those waves turn silken like the calm of a baby bath at Easter. Beaches are filled with small bodies covered with sand so you must take care. There is a profound egg hunt on Macaroni Beach and Basil, who runs the island’s groovy bar at other times, gives out highly desirable prizes to almost everybody. The egg hunt is followed by the Easter Bonnet Parade, you see a lot of cameras at work because the breeze whips the hats and their ribbons this way and that and the tots scream and plunge into the sea, followed by their parents who scream, too, so there is a shrill symphony at Macaroni Beach on Easter.

Otherwise it is a gentle day. Children are taught how to brush a horse so it purrs like a kitten and there are ponies to ride. There is a Mad Hatter tea party at the playground. There are story tellers at the library, and a soccer camp, and in the evening there are outdoor movies with popcorn.

It was once thought that the sun danced on Easter Day and it certainly can be counted on to dance on Mustique. So although many love to attend services at the bamboo church, the grown ups without children to keep alive tend to lie down after church services at one beach or another - to resurrect the best in themselves no doubt.

Mustique is not St. Barts, but there is a traditional island Jump Up at Basils Bar Easter night as well as a splendid evening with a star here and there at the island’s only hotel, the Cotton House — a lovely thing, that hotel, small, beautifully done and managed with great sympathy and skill.

My husband and I built a home there in the early eighties. Mustique had been created by an imaginative man, Colin Tennant, as a place where his royal cousins could have a few kicks out of sight — it could have become a kicky island in general but almost miraculously it didn’t. It is a community, not a resort. It’s the small town your children love to come home to. Children always come home to Mustique. That, I suppose, is the reason I am building a new home there, a smaller, simpler one than the one I had, but overlooking the sea for my family and me. Building a house in Mustique, or anywhere in the lower Caribbean, (it is jumping, there are no real estate problems here) is another story though – oh boy – I’ll tell you that one soon!

The children in my life have graduated from the Easter Bunny into Wii territory. They’re more school influenced and concerned with high cholesterol than with Easter eggs. They concern themselves with low-fat content and arguing whether broccoli or spinach is best for you. The chocolate Easter rabbit is finished!

I love to visit churches but I am ashamed to show up just on Easter and Christmas, so I will pack my Christopher Hitchens’ books and go away somewhere warm to study to see if I can argue Christian logic. And on Sunday, I will give the Greek greeting “Christos Anesti” (“Christ is Risen”) to everyone I meet, hoping someone will answer, “He is risen indeed!”

I am remembering that I once spent Easter on Mykonos in the Greek Islands. All the Easter eggs were painted bright red and one cracked them against their neighbors in an orgy of shells, yolks and violence. I have no idea why. I remember being bombarded by Greek fireworks as half-naked men thronged the streets to crash into the nightclubs and that, nearby, on the island of Delos, no one was allowed to be born or to die – it being the birthplace of Apollo.

The best Easter is when I manage to honor a tradition from childhood in Ireland, when Ricki, my godfather’s graceful and inspired wife, made us paint eggs. Many eggs. Nothing dyed: everything precise.

We painted on perfect hollow eggshells that would last for years, because experience had taught Ricki that if you paint a beautiful raw egg, or a hardboiled egg, after a few months you will have a very beautiful thing that is rotting inside and presents a constant danger should it be broken. She taught us how to empty the eggs by making a pinhole at each end, how to blow the egg substance out through the slightly larger one.

We learned that the white is easy, the yolk needs a bit of extra piercing, and then there’s always a nasty moment when the slithery opaque bit won’t come out. That’s when you work the needle back into, and out of, the hole you made. The bigger hole, which is on the bottom, facing the inside of the sink. Over which you are bending. Blowing till your ears ache. A good way of clearing the last of that winter catarrh. A waste of egg.

After you have blown out 24 eggs you will be exhausted so you will put the other boxes of eggs in the refrigerator. Don’t bother buying organic triple A omega plus cage free eggs. You will not be eating these eggs.

In Ireland we used watercolors; today it’s felt tip pens and paint markers, doilies, glitter glue, scissors, highlighters, sundry shining bits, and far too many gold and silver felt tips. I cook and invite people in. Once their first reticence is overcome, usually because someone unselfconscious has started doing something interesting to an egg, they become absolutely driven 6 year olds. Even those who don’t care for the idea are soon grabbing the white eggs — a better surface for paint and color than brown ones — and huddling over their chosen colors, tongues hanging out. There are always brown ones because their shells are harder and they are easier to blow out.

There are long moments of silence. Sneaky grabs for the red paint. The gold felt tip. The silver. The tiny purple stars. One year, a remarkable woman called Tukey Koffend broke the eggshells, to decorate only the insides, demonstrating a great understanding of jewelry making , and true Fabergé skill. We all copied her.

Some spoilers conceal unpainted eggs in their clothing so they can put off the hell moment. The hell moment is when we’ve run out of empty eggs and someone has to stand over the sink again, blowing out more eggs.

The Easters when I do this are the happiest. Painting the eggs is the innocent release that you need at the end of a long winter, and a way of celebrating renewal and rebirth.<br>

Note. You might want to wash the eggs before applying your lips to them.
Note 2. You need several helpers. Blowing out twelve eggs creates a vacuum in the head.
Note 3. You do not want to cook and eat the eggs you have blown out.
Note 4. If you live in a walkup, the best way to get rid of the egg mess is to cook it all up into an omelet anyway. And then throw away the omelet.
Note 5. Those who have made the best eggs will want to keep them, unless you devise a prize giving ceremony in which you bestow some garish trinket as a trophy on the creator of the best egg, which you then display prominently until they have left the premises.

Easter. Holiday of pastels. And eggs. And hunts.

Well, no more hunts as my daughter is 22 but the hunts we had!! Oy. When Chloe was 5, I bought a rabbit suit (for 75 bucks which I thought was a great buy) for a series of Easter Hunts we had at our house in the hills in Los Angeles. And it was such a swell party. We decorated the garden with pastel paper lanterns and hid eggs everywhere and quarantined the kids in Chloe’s room while we hid the eggs in 2 zones.

The youngest zone and the slightly older zone. Then, I got a friend to suit up in das Rabbit Suit and he would hop by outside the window of her room while I pulled open the curtain to reveal … .da da … the EASTER BUNNY!! And kids would shreik and whoop and we let them out of the house to hunt with their baskets full of shredded green paper grass and they would stampede across the patio in pursuit of loot. It was great.

And one year Lois, our beloved Bassett mix, found the coveted Golden Chocolate Bunny and had just curled up in her bed and was pulling off the foil in complete euphoria and we caught her and snatched it away in the nick of time, which left her understandably cranky as hell.

And now … and now … well, she is leaving Easter Sunday with her pod of pals for Mexico for Spring Break and my husband and I will be in Los Angeles with his kids and 4 grandkids who, being Jewish, are not wise to the ways of my people this time of year. Though they are wise in every other.

I’m going to be with my husband at our wonderful house in Vero Beach, Florida, awaiting the arrival of brilliant young friends from Washington (he a prominent TV newsman; she a very funny actress) with their two little girls and of my darling stepdaughter and her three children (plus her manny who is also her surfing instructor and a nanny) and of a movie director who is a wonderful, smart, delightful family friend. All coming in on Easter Sunday from different places. We will have a blast with political talk, gossip, stories from our lives. We’ll all eat too much. I’ll play tennis every day, the others will go to the beach (our front yard), surf, swim in the pool while I avoid the sun and spend the afternoons alone reading. Ah bliss! We’ll be together for a few days before those with children take off for Disney World for a quick visit and then regretfully we’ll return home, saying goodbye to Florida until next Thanksgiving.