Nostalgia: Easter again so let's choc and roll ..

WITH Easter Sunday tomorrow, thoughts will be turning to three seasonal essentials – eggs, eating and escape.

The feast is associated with the beginning of spring, the end of fasting and the first major holiday of the year and has been celebrated in style in Edinburgh for decades.

Some of our earliest pictures show delighted children rolling Easter eggs down Bruntsfield Links in 1959, and even more delighted children at Princess Margaret Rose hospital receiving a giant Easter egg donated by city retailer RS McColl four years later.

Of course, McColl's isn't the only retailer to satisfy the city's children's sweet tooth over the years. Casey's Sweet Shops were a fixture in the city for more than seven decades until their closure in 2006.

But back in 1984 founder James Casey was preparing for one of the busiest times of the year, mixing the chocolate for his Easter eggs, bunnies, chicks and ducks, at his St Mary's Street shop.

While egg rolling – and eating – are still a regular feature of Easter celebrations today, one tradition that hasn't stood the test of time is the Easter bonnet.

Our archives show parades of decorative Easter hats stretching from Holyrood Park to Portobello Beach throughout the 60s and 70s. However, the quest to find a little sun at the end of the winter is an Easter tradition which shows no sign of waning.

The first hints of slightly more clement weather has seen Edinburgh's residents exit the city at holiday time in search of sun, sea and sand.

Sadly, the sun can still be a bit reluctant to show his face as March turns to April, as our pictures of miserable looking commuters struggling to hold on to their brollies in the middle of an Easter blizzard show.

But in a good year the Easter holidays provide ample opportunity for families to get away for a long weekend, and this has always resulted in packed travel schedules at the city's bus and railway stations.

In the 1950s trains were still the preferred choice of travel and queues at Waverley Station were a regular feature during the Easter holidays, but by the late 1960s the car was becoming the main means of escape and created another form of queue altogether.

Over the holiday period people also took to the road, which meant traffic was heavier than usual.

Those of us lamenting the congestion at Shandwick Place as 21st century tram works continue to snag up the city can take solace in the fact that in 1969, more than a decade after the first lot of trams were removed, traffic in the west of the city wasn't much better at Easter time.