It used to be that around Easter, every grocery store would sponsor something called a Coloring Contest. A parent could pick up a photocopied coloring page of an Easter bunny or a decorated egg or – jackpot! – both (see above) and take it home for their child so they could enter the realm of arbitrary competition by coloring the picture and then dropping off the completed masterpiece back at the grocery store. Odds of winning substantially increased if your parent dropped it off at the same store. You could check for yourself if you went before the specified holiday and found yours among the multitude of identical holiday icons, taped into place like another brick in the wall.

The week after Easter you would find out who won the contest when you read the Vermilion Standard where we went for all the latest tweets before the advent of smart phones. I never knew how first prize (a bike), second prize (a ham) and third prize (an Eastalta Co-op-logo-emblazed t-shirt that would never be worn, ever, except maybe to paint the barn) were awarded. I assumed, at the tender age when coloring pictures was a passion, that it was because of serious coloring skills. Alas, I realize now that after Easter, someone probably crunched every last page into a ball, threw them into a bingo barrel and picked out three AT RANDOM.

Or maybe (more likely) someone from the store chose their three favorites, perhaps because The Winning Color-er used a particularly lovely shade of yellow for the Easter chick. Or because they painted their bunny rabbit the sanctioned brown or white, the usual bunny colors. (But not purple or blue or black. You probably couldn’t win with a black Easter bunny. Not when I was a kid.)

I harbour particularly bad feelings about a particular substitute teacher when I was in grade five surrounding a memory about coloring pictures of Easter bunnies. I probably thought it was pretty lame that IN GRADE FIVE we were given pictures to color for “art class”, but I this was also back when I was in Obedient Student mode. If you gave me an school assignment, I was on it. (Well, except for maybe gym class.) So, I colored my Easter bunny some very lovely shades of violet and mauve, thinking I could at least go the avant garde route.

I probably still hadn’t recovered from The Yellow Submarine Fiasco of Grade One when I discovered my picture pinned up on the back bulletin board with a mark (a mark!!) of 55% on it – for everyone to see and to compare. Oh, and I compared! My coloring was impeccable! I had added tufts of grass around the bunny’s feet! I used gold-leaf to embellish the Easter egg! This was a travesty! Meanwhile, my academic rival, who happened to be this teacher’s neighbor and favorite, colored his rabbit plain old Laurentian number 10 brown and got 95%.

The angst is not unlike that of this comedian – skip ahead to time 2:47 when his father derides him for coloring a monkey purple. (Purple is obviously the choice of us “artistic people”.)

I suppose that it’s these kind of childhood events that “build character”. For sure, they build grudges memories. But even more, I like to think that this was when I started to call out the status quo, to contest the idea that “teacher knows best” if only in my mind. What’s wrong with a purple cartoon bunny anyway? Where’s the creativity in everyone’s picture looking exactly the same?

I’m a big fan of creativity. And sometimes that looks like standing out and looking different from everyone else. And it’s definitely not something that should be marked and compared. Just sayin.