Easter couldn’t compare to Christmas for early-morning bounty, of course, but there was something really neat about devouring jelly beans and breaking off a solid milk chocolate ear for that precious pre-breakfast ritual that came only once a year.

Then came church, one of the handful of Sundays when Mom and Pop dialed to “zero tolerance” their “I can’t go because … ” excuse meter. That, any former kid can tell you, means nothing short of accidental decapitation is a valid excuse to miss church. It’s not that singing and praying among tall white pants and wide, gaudy hats was so bad, but what kid wants to be wrapped in embarrassingly clean clothes, nearly strangled by a length of striped cloth and forced to pose for photos on a nice, warm spring morning?

All the chocolate ears, jelly beans and Peeps in the Easter Bunny’s den aren’t worth such indignities.

Mercifully, some very fortunate young men – this one included – began, with apologies to Lord Tennyson, to turn our collective springtime fancy lightly to thoughts not so much of love, but of an exquisitely marinated dish that, thanks to Pop’s awesome Old World culinary acumen, became the centerpiece of an enduring Easter Sunday family tradition.

Pop, like a lot of other Nashuans of Mediterranean heritage, needed a reliable partner to pull off his favorite annual ritual, a labor of love that involved cutting big slabs of meat into little cubes, spicing them up just right in a bath of carefully selected olive oil, storing them in a cool place, then stringing them on long, pointy skewers bound for a hot bed of charcoal.

He found them in a pair of brothers named Apostoles and Sterios, Greek-Macedonian immigrants who ran a little corner store famous for its ethnic offerings and hailed across town for having what most considered the best lamb around.

A sign out front bore the brothers’ last name – Liamos – synonymous with lamb and shish kebab (Middle Eastern term for meat on a skewer) in these parts for some 85 years.

From its Roaring ’20s debut as Liamos Brothers Market, the little store moved just once – in 1970, from 176 W. Pearl St., a spot that’s now just about in the middle of the Bronstein Apartments, to 295 Lake St. And when it went, it took every bit of its Old World charm, service and quality along.

Today, Olga Liamos Katsoupis and her son Mike are “The Lamb People,” the tag the family has carried for decades. While “Liamos” is certainly among the easier Greek names to pronounce and remember, “The Lamb People” is even easier. And, better, straight to the point.

“It was the thing to do, I guess,” Olga Katsoupis said the other day, thinking back to why her father and uncle opened the store. “It was mostly all Greek in the beginning. It was full service, too, but it was mainly the meat, lamb, beef, chicken that people came in for.”

Today, Mike Katsoupis handles the day-to-day affairs while his mom alternates between the cash register and kitchen. “The Lamb People,” he said, also prepare and sell most every kind of meat.

“It’s our major thrust,” Katsoupis said. “Lamb kebabs, ribs, strip steak, filet mignon, chicken, we do a lot of it.”

The kind of small-store quality and time-honored prep methods too often lost in the world of giant supermarkets are as in place at Liamos as they were back when Apostoles and Sterios Liamos worked magic with their meat cleavers while chatting up neighbors.

“People just can’t find this kind of quality in the big stores,” Katsoupis said.

He cites feta cheese as an example.

“It’s all the high-end, imported stuff … we carry different types of feta, the Greek, of course, and import it from France and Bulgaria, too.”

As one might expect, the French version is a smoother, milder blend than the Bulgarian, which, Katsoupis said, tends to be of harder texture and even tangier than Greek to the taste. Who knew?

Easter is probably Katsoupis’ busiest time of year, although Christmas is right up there, and grilling-weather occasions like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and the Fourth of July are hectic at the store.

“We get slammed big time,” Katsoupis said of Easter, which is actually two holidays for many – “regular” Easter, and Orthodox, commonly called Greek, Easter. When they’re a week apart, like this year, it means a longer “slammed” period for the Katsoupises, but when they fall on the same day, look out.

Born one of four children to Apostoles and Evanthia Liamos, Olga was around 10 – “just big enough to see over the counter” – when her dad and uncle put her to work afternoons after school and on weekends.

“They were pretty established by then, and I remember being busy all the time,” she said. “There was always an afternoon rush I helped with. I really liked being in there. It was such a family place.”

The extended family lived on Ash Street, less than a block from the store and a couple of doors from the former St. Nicholas Church, one of two Greek churches in the neighborhood. Greek families, most of them recent immigrants, were abundant in the area, known in Nashua’s more compacted, pre-turnpike era as the West End.

“Back then, stores were on every corner,” Olga Katsoupis said.

That’s not an exaggeration. A quick look through old Yellow Pages under “markets” and “grocers” shows close to 100 listings, most all within Nashua, then a city of probably 35,000 or so.

One listing is for Caron’s Market, 295 Lake St., which would become the present-day Liamos in 1970.

As Nashuans, and all Americans, put World War II behind them and began looking forward to brighter, prosperous times, Olga Liamos met a young man named Christopher Katsoupis. The two married, and in 1963, bought the business from her father, who had run it alone since Sterios Liamos died in 1957.

“My father taught my husband all about cutting meat,” Olga Katsoupis remembers. “He used to say, ‘Look at that, Chris is better than I am,’?” she said with a laugh.

Apostoles Liamos was 94 when he died in 1994. But his quintessential “American Dream” story, guided gently by his daughter and grandson, is as robust as ever, just like his unaltered, original shish kebab marinade.

Dean Shalhoup can be reached at 594-6443 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.