Why the Easter Bunny Wears a Top Hat

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by Barb in Key West where it’s c-c-c-old (64 degrees)

In the reader letter at the end of “Hopped Along,” my novella in Easter Basket Murder, released last Tuesday, I explain why my Easter Bunny wears a top hat.

I know why my Easter Bunny wears a top hat and tails. It comes from one of my favorite stories told by my father. When he was small, maybe five or six, he heard a noise outside just after dawn on Easter morning. Hoping to catch the Easter Bunny in the act of leaving the basket, he got out of bed and sat at the top of the stairs. Through the transom over the door, he was thrilled to see a top hat bobbing down the front walk. When the door to the house started to open, he lost his nerve and darted back to bed.

I don’t know how many years later it was that my father figured out that he’d seen the top of his father’s head as his parents returned at dawn from a formal party. But after my dad witnessed that scene through the transom, he said forever after he pictured the Easter Bunny wearing a top hat, and thus I do, too.

I especially loved this story because my father wasn’t given to mythologizing his childhood–or telling many stories about it at all. I adored his parents. As a teenager in the 1960s, their tales of the 1920s, beaded dresses and bathtub gin, where entrancing to me. I spent a lot of time with them and their colorful assortment of friends–millionaires, gigolos, B-to-D list celebrities, gay couples. All people who were kind and lovely to me. My grandparents were wonderful in an Auntie Mame-ish sort of way. Now that I’m older I can see that while that was great for grandparents, maybe it wasn’t the greatest for parents. Returning at dawn from a party on Easter Sunday may be emblematic of my father’s almost-never-spoken-about reservations about his upbringing.

As it happens, I still have that top hat, still in its original packaging. I have no idea why my grandparents saved it or why my parents saved it when it came to them or why I’m saving it except that having lasted this long…

The label on the box says it was deliverd C.O.D. to R. M. Ross for $9.94 to 38 Westminster Court in New Rochelle, NY, on December 22, (unfortunately no year). My father’s family, which included his mother’s father, lived at that address in the 1930s. By the mid-thirties when my father would have been old enough to have observed the hat bouncing down the front walk, the days of flappers and bathtub gin were over. Neither my grandfather, who was stockbroker, nor my great-grandfather, who had worked in my grandmother’s family’s interior design business, was working. (Neither profession is built to withstand economic downturns.) The only income coming in would have been from my grandmother, who worked at Saks Fifth Avenue. She eventually became a millinery buyer, but in those years she may have been behind a counter selling hats.

Paying $9.94 for a top hat during the Depression must have been an indulgence. On the other hand, having the chance to go to a fancy party and recapture a bit of your younger years must have been irresistible.

Inside the hat
Original tissue paper
Back of the sales slip above

I love that R.H. Macy’s, however diminished, is still at Herald Square. Given the many evolutions and revolutions in retail in the last 90 years, it seems like a miracle.

So now you know why my Easter Bunny wears a top hat.

Readers: Does your Easter Bunny wear a top hat? Do you have a tale from a parent’s or grandparent’s youth that you treasure? Tell us about it.

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Published by Barbara Ross

Barbara Ross is the author of twelve Maine Clambake Mystery novels and six novellas. Her books have been nominated for multiple Agatha Awards for Best Contemporary Novel and have won the Maine Literary Award for Crime Fiction. She lives in Portland, Maine. Readers can visit her website at www.maineclambakemysteries.com

18 Thoughts

  1. First, I loved the novelette! No Easter stories from parents or grandparents, but our daughter has one to tell. Around 12 years ago she converted to Judaism. So we all celebrate the Jewish holidays with her. But she doesn’t want to give up the secular parts of the Christian holidays. So at Easter, we give her a traditional Easter basket, adding a Passover card to it. One year the basket was a bunny. So, I made a yarmulke for it.

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  2. What a wonderful story, Barb. Thank you for sharing it with us. I’ve never thought about whether my Easter Bunny wears a top hat or not. I have images of the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland in my head, and I don’t think he wore a top hat

    For years I kept my grandfather’s I guess you would call it a fedora. He went mostly bald starting in his twenties, so he always wore a hat when he left the house. I really cherished it, but it got to be in worse and worse shape, and I think it finally hit the trash bin. It’s not like a book that you can conserve and fix up.

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    1. I understand completely. I don’t really know how to take care of the hat in my keeping and wonder if I’ll be able to pass it down. Or if I should since my kids never knew my grandfather.

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  3. I love that hat! I wish I’d kept some of my mom’s clothes from her youth. She was quite the fashionista for a farm girl. I remember one pair of shoes that were absolutely stunning. I crammed my feet into them for a high school dance despite them being a full size too small (but open-toed). I only wore them the one time but still loved them.

    As for stories, nothing as cool as the Easter Bunny in a top hat.

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  4. That’s a really cool keepsake, Barb. Every now and then my would talk about a family member who was a professional safe cracker who didn’t work for law enforcement. I wish I’d written those stories down. Would be great book material!

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  5. Oh, that is wonderful! What a treasure.

    My Easter bunnies should have worn top hats, they had no ears thanks to my father’s sweet tooth! I would get to see them in the basket (with ears) and then the ears mysteriously disappeared. He confessed when I was in my 20s. I always blamed my nine years older than me brother.

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    1. That is so funny! It’s just like that my kids never knew there were black jelly beans because Bill and I would eat them all before they made it into the basket.

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      2. Kait and Barbara, the comic strip “Sally Forth” has a long running Easter theme of Sally (the mother) eating the ears off Hillary’s (the daughter) chocolate rabbit. Elaborate schemes to hide the rabbit, to break the ears off before Easter, to buy two rabbits. By “long running” Hillary was preschool age and is now nearly in college. (Fictional time…longer and shorter as needed.) Elisabeth

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  6. That is a fun story. I feel like I’ve seen other illustrations of Easter Bunnies wearing top hats, but I could be wrong on that. It’s certainly a wonderful picture.

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    1. Before I wrote the novella I was absolutely convinced the Easter Bunny wore a top hat and did a lot of Googling. There are a lot of images out there of bunnies in top hats (and also bunnies being pulled out of top hats).

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