Calistoga’s kids are diehard fans of the Easter Bunny, or at least, for the Easter Bunny’s annual gift of colored eggs.

For years the Easter Bunny has been stealing credit for planting about a thousand colored eggs in the clover-filled field next to the Cropp building at the Napa County Fairgrounds.

A recent Weekly Calistogan investigation however, has uncovered the fact that the eggs are really the gift of the Calistoga Lions Club, for longer than anyone can remember.

This year, cool temperatures and a light rain threatened to put a damper on the event, but it wasn’t a serious threat. Kids from preschool through about the fifth grade turned up wearing jackets, and in some cases, golashes and bright yellow rain slickers, to scoop up as many of the oval-shaped goodies as they could, and hopefully win an extra prize or two along the way.

“A lady came up to me a few minutes before the hunt got started and told me she used to bring her daughter here every year when she was little,” said Lions Club secretary Ron Mashburn after the great egg rush. “Now she said she brings her granddaughter here — so that’s one generation we’ve been doing this, at least.

“I don’t think anyone really knows how long we’ve been doing it,” he said.

Asking the kids about how long they thought the tradition has been going on usually met with a shrug of the shoulders or a timid “I don’t know,” but almost universally it seemed they didn’t care — it happened this year, and that was enough.

“My daughter isn’t usually shy,” said Denise Drawsky. “She was just a little unsure about going over to sit on the bunny’s lap.”

After Drawsky’s daughter Nicole had her picture taken by an off-duty police officer who used a near-antique Polaroid camera, with film the Lions joked had been purchased from an antique shop since the cameras and film had gone out of production years ago, she joined her mom, smiling, with her face and fingers covered with chocolate from the special Cadbury egg the bunny had given her.

“This is such a fun tradition for the kids,” Drawsky said. “I’m really thankful that the Lions Club is still doing it after all these years.”

The egg hunt lasted something less than three minutes, but getting to that point took days, starting with an evening of boiling and coloring the nine crates of eggs containing nine dozen eggs each.

“We had a lot of Lions Club members and some volunteer kids who helped,” Mashburn said. “The best part is seeing the kids doing the dying. By they time they were done they all went home with rainbow-colored fingers. It’s a wonder that the dye ever came off.”

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