"Easter" Done My Way

Yesterday I posted about how I've made Easter Egg hunts more peaceful. Today I will give you all my other "Easter" secrets.

1. "Yucky Eggs": Stepping gingerly through the grass, shoulders hunched in concentration, eyes searching high and low, the children comb the lawn with baskets in hand looking for Easter eggs. "WAIT JUST A MINUTE!!! How come you guys aren't picking up the real Easter eggs???"
"Because we only like the ones wif candy in 'em."
"You pick up the real eggs right now or I'm going to take all the candy ones away!"
Oh yeah, I totally know how to ruin a fun time.
It totally bugs me that my kids are so spoiled that they refuse to pick up the real eggs. I'm sorry, but we just spent a big messy evening dying those things, DSSH spent half an hour hiding them, and I really want my deviled eggs with dinner tonight but I'll be darned if I'm gonna go traipsing through the wet cold grass to pick them up. So this is what I do now. I trade egg finding hints for real eggs. Yup, DSSH makes sure to hide the really good plastic eggs in obnoxiously hard spots and the kids can only get hints in return for a hard boiled egg. I sit on the deck (eating my Easter candy) and collect them all. This also helps keep the eggs from being smashed before I can get them. They are always out in plain view too. Other tricks I've seen for this problem are giving a small toy in trade for an egg, having clues written on the eggs, or simply getting rid of any candy eggs whatsoever (YEAH RIGHT!).

2. Just Say, "No," To Grass: Easter basket grass, that is. Can't stand the stuff. It is useless, messy, clogs vacuums, I'm sure it chokes squirrels and birds, and I know for a fact that the landfills don't need it. Why is it even still legal? Instead I do what my mom always did. I go out and buy myself some new kitchen or bathroom towels and use them to pad our Easter baskets. Sure, they get a bit dirty but then that is their purpose anyway, and then I have something useful in the end. I've also done personalized handkerchiefs for each kid that they can use later.

3. Year Round Easter Baskets: We did the cute little Easter Basket thing for several years, we even made our own out of garbage (some on once said this is the stupidest thing you can do because then the item is no longer recycleable). After years of cleaning, storing, finding, mending, and buying a basket that only gets used once a year I finally got wise. Now we use buckets or baskets that we can use every day. I use Easter as the time to buy new beach buckets (if needed), new organizing baskets, new beach bags, etc... Anything with handles that needs to be replaced that year gets bought and used as an Easter basket first. Sometimes we spiffy them up with ribbons or stickers. This year I got the kids new beach buckets with shovels (though not as cute as the ones I have pictures here).

4. Easter Vs. The Bunny: I've often had that common concern about having such an important spiritual holiday commercialized and paganized. I'm mean, honestly, how can you possibly give a 4 year old a basket of candy and then ask them to think about Jesus? I'm sorry, it is just a cruel expectation. I know that many others have done this but it was a totally new idea to me when I first heard of it so I will explain what we do to remedy the situation. We have simply separated our Spring celebrations from our Easter celebration. One family I know does this by celebrating spring (eggs, candy, bunnies, etc) on the first day of Spring, and Easter on Easter Sunday. I would love to do it this way but my husband likes to do it the way we do it now. We celebrate Spring on the Saturday before Easter Sunday. This way we have all day to play on Saturday, no sugar highs in church the next day (or at least no fresh sugar highs), and we can completely focus on the real reason for Easter. We talk about the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the atonement, we watch movies on this subject, and all of our activities have to do with this all important event. Next week I will post some of the ways that we celebrate Easter and not Spring.