There are things from childhoods past that we associate with Easter.

For me, the sight and smell of hyacinths in pink, purple and white  profusion that peopled and popped up in our living room at Easter, is a tradition that I continue for my husband and I, and for my now-grown children.

Traditions continue what is important and lend a linking and permanence to a past that was. It ensures continuity in a world that is topsy turvy half the time. Children need to know that continuity exists as does tradition and predictability. And they need to know friendship can happen at the oddest moments with unpredictable results…if we are patient!

Children love tradition and the expectation of what is to come. And Margaret Wise Brown’s 1947 gift of a classic picture book read called The Golden Egg Book” is available now as a sturdy and portable board book.

And this coming Easter that is good news for the moms and dads of young readers. The story of newly discovered friendship enhanced beautifully by the softness of Leonard Weisgard’s iconic art of spring in bloom, only adds to the joy of this classic picture book.

The emerging newness of nature is brought to delightful effect in Ms. Wise Brown’s classic original “Big Little Golden Book,” and now as a beautiful board book.

And “emerging” is the key word in this delightful classic picture book, as a small brown bunny chances upon a soft blue egg in the spring grass. Something is moving inside, and Leonard Weisgard’s imaginative art conjures the very pictures, egg wise, of what the small brown bunny imagines alternately to be in the egg…

Maybe a small boy,

Maybe another bunny,

Maybe an elephant ,

Maybe a mouse.

Ruminating thoughtfully leads to pushing it with his foot, jumping on top of it throwing nuts at it, and finally rolling it down a hill. No go!

Even the smallest of rocks does not make a dent. But Something is definitely trying to get out of the egg. Listening leads to yawning and then to a cozy curled up bunny cuddled up close to the egg.

And what emerges from the soft blue egg is a little yellow duck. And HE too is mesmerized by what HE sees:

“Well, what is this?” said the little duck

        when he saw the bunny.

“What could this little fur thing be?”

“Inside the egg,”

  said the duck,

“I thought I was all alone

     in a small dark world.

“Now I find myself alone with a bunny

      in a big bright world.

And the bunny won’t wake up.”

But the yellow duck has a tit for tat time with the same acrobatics on the bunny that the bunny tried on the egg. And it works! Astonishment is the order of the day as the bunny cogitates WHERE in the dickens came this duck?

And, just as Humphrey Bogart ‘s Rick Blaine states to Claude Rains’ Capt Louis Renault at the end scene in the movie “Casablanca,”:

“Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

But THIS time, it’s the same great end game for duck and bunny!