Sean set his alarm for 5am.
Not to work out. Not for an early flight. To put on his bathrobe and slippers, grab a basket of eggs, and walk around a French château in the dark with his phone flashlight, hiding things in places he would have to remember later. This is what real love looks like, and Hallmark has never once filmed this part.
I was asleep. I remain unashamed.
The kids woke me at six. I was risen!
We made them wait. Not long, but enough for a little patience stretching. Everyone got dressed, faces washed, the full civilized morning routine, because anticipation is part of it and also because Sean needed to finish his dutch pancakes with fresh raspberry sauce (I mean…it is Easter). We had smoothies. We sat at the table like people who live in a house and eat breakfast together and don’t immediately sprint outside at dawn.
Then we let them go.
They started at the château, finding eggs tucked into corners and along windowsills, and then followed a trail further out, up toward the hidden chapel, and then into the bluebell forest.
I want to try to describe what it looked like to watch two small children find brightly colored eggs hidden in a carpet of bluebells, with the morning light coming through the trees, and I keep running out of words. Ethereal is the right one and also feels insufficient. It looked like something that shouldn’t be real. It looked like the kind of thing you’d see in a film and think was too much.
It was not too much. It was exactly enough.
If you’re new here, welcome. We’re an American family living in a small château in rural France, figuring it out one beautiful, occasionally chaotic day at a time. This post is free. If you’d like to follow the whole story - the renovation, the forest, the chickens, and everything else we’re building here - we’d love to have you along.
I have to tell you what happened the day before, because it’s part of the story.
We were in the car - all four of us - when our six year old said, very casually, “Is the Easter bunny real? Or do you guys hide the eggs?”
Sean and I did the thing. The side-eye. The slight pause. The careful non-answer that buys you approximately thirty seconds while you figure out what the other person thinks you should say. Our five year old was in the back seat, listening to every word with the focused attention of a very small lawyer.
We evaded. We moved on. We thought we’d gotten away with it.
That afternoon, my daughter came and sat next to me on the sofa. She looked me directly in the eyes with an expression I can only describe as a tiny detective who already knows the answer and is giving you one last chance to come clean.
“Mom,” she said. “I want to know the REAL truth. The really REAL truth. Are YOU the ones who hide the eggs?”
I hesitated. Then nodded, slowly. With what I imagine was a very guilty smile.
She didn’t say anything. She got up, found her brother, and immediately told him everything.
Sean and I waited for the fallout. The tears, the betrayal, the collapse of magic. We waited.
Nothing.
So I asked them: “What do you WANT the answer to be?”
One after the other, without hesitation: “I want it to be the Easter Bunny.”
“Okay then,” I said. “Let it be what you want it to be.”
And that was that. The next morning they opened eggs in a bluebell forest saying “I can’t believe the Easter Bunny knew we like organic chocolate!” with complete and total commitment. They know. They absolutely know. And they chose the magic anyway.
I’ve thought about this a lot today - the deliberate decision to keep believing in something even after you’ve seen behind the curtain, because the thing behind the curtain is less interesting than what you had before. I don’t think that’s naivety. I think that might actually be wisdom, and I think my five and six year old have figured out something it takes most adults considerably longer to land on.
After the eggs were opened on the lawn - and we went all out this year, disco eggs and crystal eggs and celestine eggs and shaker eggs that rattle like maracas and dragon eggs and a considerable amount of organic chocolate - we did something that felt very right for this property on this particular day.
We got out the croquet set.
Sean bought it last year at a brocante, which is essentially a French antique market and one of my favorite institutions in this country. The croquet set is approximately 150 years old. It is also not entirely complete and somewhat fragile, which we chose not to think about too hard. Sean mowed the area, we set up a modified version that accommodated the gaps in our set, and we played croquet on the lawn of our French château on Easter Sunday.
It felt exactly like Downton Abbey. I kept waiting for Carson to appear with the afternoon tea. He never came. But I have recently been taught by two small children that you can know something isn't real and choose the better version anyway, so: Carson came. The tea was lovely. “That’ll be all, Carson.” I've decided.
Lunch was sandwiches at the little bistro table outside. Passion fruit kombucha from our local bio shop. Sunshine. The tiredness that comes from a morning spent entirely outdoors doing things that feel genuinely worth doing.
The kids went to collect eggs from the chickens, discovered that brown eggs are significantly harder to dye, and responded by getting out pens and drawing their own designs on them instead. Nothing elaborate. Just two children decorating eggs with markers, which turned out to be exactly the right amount of Easter craft for this particular day.
Then, because the day apparently had more left in it, someone suggested dress up.
Within approximately four minutes we had a fairy and a wizard.
The fairy was committed. The wizard was committed. There was no halfhearted costuming happening, no casual wearing of a hat and calling it done. These were full characters, fully inhabited, and they had places to be.
Specifically: the bluebell forest.
So we went. All four of us, in the late afternoon light, the fairy and the wizard leading the way down the path and into the trees. I walked behind them and watched them move through all that blue and purple, fully in character, narrating things to each other in the private language of children deep in their own world, and I had the specific feeling of knowing you are in a moment you will remember.
A fairy and a wizard in a bluebell forest on Easter Sunday. At our château. In France.
I keep trying to find the right word for what this place hands us sometimes and I keep landing on the same one: unearned. Not in a bad way, but in the way of something you couldn’t have planned or asked for and got anyway. The forest didn’t know it was Easter. It was just being itself. The children didn’t know they were making a memory. They were just playing.
The best things usually arrive that way.
We finished the day with The Secret Garden. The 1993 one. Our favorite Easter movie, despite having absolutely nothing to do with Easter, which has never once bothered us. I have a whole story about that film and this château and how one might have led to the other. But that's for another post.
Here is what I want to say about this Easter specifically:
We didn’t go overboard. There was no Pinterest table, no coordinated decorations, no Easter roast, no elaborate anything. We had a vase of flowers. We had a bluebell forest. We had a croquet set with missing pieces and a husband who hid eggs in the dark at five in the morning and children who decided to keep believing in magic even after they didn’t have to.
And then those same children put on costumes in the afternoon and walked into the forest like they owned it, which, to be fair, they kind of do.
It was our first Easter here, and we looked around at the property - at what it is now and what it’s going to become - and felt something I’ve been trying to put into words all day.
Grateful, I think. Just genuinely, simply grateful.
Simple and beautiful and ours, at our little castle.
And the Easter Bunny, for the record, has excellent taste in chocolate.
One more thing: if you’re a paid subscriber, I put the full video of our Easter day up for you this week. Twelve minutes of the bluebell egg hunt, the croquet, the fairy and the wizard in the forest, and everything in between. The real version, as it happened. You can find it here.
And if you’re not yet a paid subscriber, that’s the kind of thing waiting for you on the other side. Just saying.
If this is the first thing you’ve read from Once Upon a Castle, there’s a lot more where this came from. The renovation, the neighbors, the bluebell forest, the chickens, and the ongoing beautiful mess of building a life inside a French château. Paid subscribers get access to Castle Diaries, where I document the renovation in real time - the decisions, the tradeoffs, the design details, and everything we’re figuring out as we go. If any of that sounds like your kind of thing, come stay a while.
And, the bluebell forest is truly amazing. Turrets …. and bluebells? Which lucky star did you wish upon?
Oh I love all of this. It’s magic in its pure form—chosen, somewhat effortless and in nature. Also the secret garden may also be the guiding force of my life as well. So looking at you is giving me excited for my own future iterations.