Having long since turned apostate, Easter is a holiday that always catches me by surprise. It’s one of those weird ultra-religious holidays that seems like it’s reverting its pagan origins, shirking off the forced syncretism of the middle ages to reassert itself as a bloody rite of spring. By Sunday’s end, my children will have participated in new fewer than four Easter egg hunts, will have stared down nightmarish anthropomorphic rabbits, and will have glutted themselves on the chocolatey fruits of their labors.
Today’s patent is something with widespread cultural recognizability: Those cheap plastic eggs.
For twenty glorious years, the Highland Supply Corporation held a monopoly on these ubiquitous eggs. It’s one of those everyday objects that has become so commonplace and generic that it’s easy to forget that it was once a brand new invention. Now anyone can make them, but there was a period of time in my youth when there was only one legitimate source for them.
Nothing particularly weird about this one! Just the feeling that my youth has escaped me, while new life springs up to thoughtlessly embrace the same traditions that I thoughtlessly embraced when I was a child. You know, normal spring stuff!
Patenting the odd, the impossible, and the unnerving 