The Easter egg hunt isn’t what it used to be.
Consider the underwater egg hunts in Gwinnett and Cherokee park pools. And artificial eggs dropped from a helicopter above the football field at Cobb’s Sprayberry High School. And night hunts with glow-in-the-dark eggs. Those are souped-up versions of what used to be mostly backyard or churchyard events with giggling children toting pastel-colored baskets.
But in one tiny town outside metro Atlanta, Michael and Debbie Massey have revived a massive tradition that lasted for half a century. They spent at least $30,000 on this year’s event alone.
O.S. Garrison, whose family owned a lumberyard and cotton gin business, started an egg hunt for his employees in 1959. Later, he extended invitations to his church members, then school kids, then the community in general. It grew into such a celebrated affair that Homer in Banks County pulled thousands of people from around Georgia and other states. Three generations of Garrisons carried on what he started, putting on the free hunt every Easter Sunday.
In the mid-1980s, Guinness World Records proclaimed the Garrisons’ hunt the largest on the planet, a title it held for a while.
Some years, the family and dozens of volunteers hid more than 100,000 real and candy eggs. Tens of thousands of real ones were boiled over fires Easter morning, then dyed in big tubs. Volunteers could be identified days afterward by their stained hands and arms.
Eventually the Garrisons’ egg record was cracked — poached, really — by others, including Stone Mountain Park, which no longer holds an egg hunt. Ultimately the title was set by what was then called Cypress Gardens Adventure Park in Florida, with 501,000 eggs.
The Garrison family reluctantly ended the tradition, holding the last one in 2009.
It had gotten too costly for O.S. Garrison’s offspring to continue. One arm of the family had dropped out years earlier. Then, tow truck company owner Mack Garrison discontinued the tradition his grandfather started.
“It was a sad day to be the last one,” said Sandra Garrison, Mack’s wife, who owns a mini-storage business and serves on the Homer town council.
For two or three years, out-of-towners would still stop by Sandra and Mack Garrison’s place on Easter, unaware the hunt was no longer on. Eventually, they stopped coming.
Mack Garrison, who served for years as the volunteer fire chief for Homer and its 1,400 or so people, would look out over the empty yard on Easter morning.
“It hurt him. He was a family tradition man, I guess you could call it,” said Sandra, 63, who had been married to him for 40 years. “It was hard on him to get up on that day and not have the people.”
Mack died this past October at age 68.
Then, this year, serendipity hopped in.
Credit: Steve Schaefer
Credit: Steve Schaefer
Debbie Massey, who didn’t know the Garrisons and had only recently moved to Homer, was up late at night planning an Easter egg hunt for her four young grandkids. She went overboard and ordered 444 candy-stuffed plastic eggs online. Her husband, Michael, was perplexed by the big number. Only two of the grandkids are even old enough to really scoop up eggs on a hunt.
His wife described the joy of bringing her kids to giant egg hunts when they were little. “It was this massive field that was eggs as far as you could see,” she recalled.
Come to think of it, those hunts were in Homer, the same quiet, small town where the couple now lived after relocating from their house beside Lake Lanier.
Some 25 years earlier, after her first husband died, Debbie was a single mother, just getting by as the owner of a facial and eyelash spa in Gainesville.
“I remember being overwhelmed with thoughts of ‘Who would put this on for the community?’” she said. “I felt blessed for being there.”
Michael, who owns a contracting business working on storm sewers, listened.
“We could do that,” he said.
“We could do what?” she asked.
“We could buy a heck of a lot more eggs and do it,” he said.
They asked the city of Homer if they needed a permit to hold it on part of the more than 180 acres they own there. Local officials, as it turned out, had been planning a much smaller egg hunt as a celebration of Mack Garrison’s life. They agreed to let the couple take on the event, and the Masseys scheduled it for April 1, so that people could be with their families on the actual holiday.
“These days it is more than just show up and eat Easter eggs,” Michael said.
He and Debbie, both in their 50s, rushed to get more plastic eggs. They ended up with 54,444, with donated eggs thrown in. Debbie briefly thought about boiling and coloring real eggs, then considered the workload. She dropped the idea even before tabulating egg prices, which are sharply up over the last year.
The couple recruited friends and family to help with the event, lined up security, got tables and chairs, games, bouncy houses and more. They decided it should mostly be free of charge, except for helicopter rides, food, face painting and raffle tickets. The prizes included a dump truck load of gravel, something they heard was in demand in their rural community.
“We are not trying to do something to make it a business thing,” Michael said. “We are just trying to give back. The world is in a bad enough situation as it is.”
Neither had done anything like that before. “My daughter tells me I’m crazy,” Debbie said.
“At the end of the day, it is about Jesus and about the kids,” Michael said. “We are trying to bring back stuff family wise.”
Credit: Steve Schaefer
Credit: Steve Schaefer
Though not as massive as the earlier version, they say about 2,000 people attended the April 1 hunt. Rain that morning complicated things. Then, all of a sudden, Michael said, he saw a tidal wave of people show up at once. “As far as the eye could see, cars and cars and cars.”
“I enjoyed it,” he said. But “it was like a freaking whirlwind when it started.”
The couple is already starting to plan for next year’s giant hunt.
Credit: Steve Schaefer
Credit: Steve Schaefer
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