The Egg Tree

On Easter morning at her grandmother's Pennsylvania farm, a girl named Katy searches the attic for hidden eggs along with her brother Carl and finds instead an old box of eggs decorated years earlier, painted with the bright folk patterns of the surrounding Pennsylvania Dutch community. Her grandmother remembers the old custom of hanging decorated eggs on a bare branch to make an egg tree, and the family revives the tradition together, decorating more eggs of their own and setting up a tree that draws neighbors and cousins in to add their own eggs to it as the day goes on. Katherine Milhous both wrote and illustrated the book, filling it with the tulips, hearts and hex sign patterns of Pennsylvania Dutch folk art rendered in bright tempera and bold black outline, a style she had spent years studying in the region's actual barns, chests and pottery.

It reads as a single day's celebration rather than a plotted story with real conflict, gentle and cumulative, each new decorated egg adding to the tree the way each spread adds a bit more color to the page. Young children respond well to its holiday specificity, and families who celebrate Easter or who want an introduction to a genuine American folk custom get more out of it than the book's thin plot alone would suggest; it works best read once a year, at the season it depicts, rather than as an everyday bedtime book pulled off the shelf at random.

Milhous came to the story through her own work for the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project in Philadelphia during the late 1930s, where she had already been incorporating Pennsylvania Dutch motifs into public posters years before she turned the same material into a picture book.