Hearts have gone. Straight after Valentine's Day chocolate bunnies invaded the shelves of our supermarkets. And they've been breeding like, well, rabbits, ever since.
Lined up like troops in a foil-wrapped army, the bunnies tell us one thing. Easter is upon us.
The kids have been busy collecting their choc treasure since well before the clocks went back last weekend.
On Easter Day we can revel in family fun, feasting on the little chocolate vermin until we are all coasting on serotonin-induced cocoa highs.
Easter has traditionally been a time for feasting.
For the six long weeks of Lent, Christians take extra time for prayer and self-denial. It's not to make themselves miserable but to help them keep in mind the last days of Jesus, leading to his execution on the cross on Good Friday.
Then on Easter Day they celebrate the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. And the feasting begins.
Centuries ago, Christians in the northern hemisphere took the story about Jesus and skilfully blended it with pagan Saxon spring fertility festivals. Eggs and rabbits -- potent symbols of fertility -- have been with us ever since.
German ingenuity later combined those symbols giving us the Oschter Haws, a rabbit that laid coloured eggs in nests hidden for children to find. Before long, German settlers in Pennsylvania had taken the Easter bunny to the New World.
These fertility symbols now confront Australians not in the spring but in the autumn, just when everything in the garden begins to die.
So Easter confuses the environmentalists who only seem to want to worship the fertility of Mother Nature. And it confuses the secularists and atheists who ridicule religion but want to retain the long weekend holiday -- though they can't come up with good reasons of their own for doing so.
Even Christians sometimes find it hard to describe Easter to their non-religious friends. None of the new life imagery of spring makes much sense in the southern hemisphere. And unlike Christmas, with its familiar family story about the birth of a baby, Easter is more complicated.
Christmas happens overnight. But the story of Easter takes four days to tell, just enough for that long weekend.
"That's enough for me, mate!" someone once declared as he shook my hand at the church door after our Good Friday service.
"Jeez, it's going to be a beautiful weekend!" he cut in as I started to explain what services were yet to come.
So Easter is complicated. But it is a compelling story that features betrayal by friends, selfless sacrifice and the blood and guts of a gruesome death.
And then just when the light of hope has been snuffed out, Easter turns into a dramatic and miraculous reversal. Although Jesus died on the cross, three days later he rose from the tomb in which his friends had placed him.
Mind you, Christians have been arguing ever since about just what did happen on that first Easter morning.
But you don't need complex theology to see that Easter is really about the triumph of hope in the midst of apparent defeat.
We face setbacks in our lives. Time passes so much more quickly than we realise. Our bodies sag in sudden and surprising ways. And grief strikes when loved ones die or relationships end.
Adversity can easily knock us off course as we go about the business of living. Easter is inspiring because it is about one remarkable person who did face down adversity and death, and yet triumphed.
So the message of Easter is really quite simple. It's about how hope, against all odds, gives us the courage we need to confront even the most demanding crisis.
For courage does not just belong on the battlefield. Courage is a necessary part of everyday life. It is the virtue each of us needs if we are to remain strong in the face of real adversity.
At those times when we have faced down our fears and pressed on regardless, we have done so because of courage.
We need courage to be open to an uncertain future. There are no guarantees about house prices, sea levels or even 4G accessibility.
The Easter bunny reminds us that hope is always renewed.
As you pick at the gold foil over the weekend, take a moment to remember that Easter is a story about the courage of daily life.
It's a story about you.
Happy Easter!
The Rev Peter Kurti is a Visiting Fellow with the Religion and the Free Society Program at The Centre for Independent Studies.