Raising Creative Children » Easter eggs

Easter Gifts

Lorelei — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 14:56:51 +0000

Easter Egg Hunts Have Little to do with the Meaning of Easter

Recently I read a post by a young mom asking for advice on what she should give her toddler for Easter. She wrote that she didn’t want to go overboard like she had last year, but then she went on name a long list of things she had already purchased, and was obviously looking for ideas for more. I was rather astounded, actually. When did Easter become a second Christmas? What is it that we are teaching our children by showering them with toys several times a year? Or is this just another way advertisers have brainwashed us to spend our money on their products?

Why You Celebrate Easter

First off, I’d like to ask, if you are not a Christian family, why are you celebrating Easter? And secondly, if you are a religious family, what do you want your child to learn about this holy day? Easter is God’s ultimate gift to us, the gift of His Son, who died for us. The words are common enough. You see them, read them, sing them, and hear them all through the year. But what we ought to reflect upon is that actually… we were supposed to die! That is our punishment for sin. Eternal death! But God loves us, so He sent His only begotten son Jesus to suffer a horrible death in our place. Now our bodies will age and eventually die, but we will rise from the dead, body and soul, to live forever in the presence of God.

On Easter Morning, Christians Celebrate Jesus Rising From the Dead

Easter is not about the Easter bunny, or jelly beans or bird eggs or new dresses, or tricycles or chocolates or stuffed toys or candy. It is the time that we should teach our children about sin and forgiveness, about worship and celebration and joy. Getting them wound up on a sugar high is almost guaranteed to have a cranky whiny self-centered child that you may have to discipline or send to bed early.

Our Family Easter Traditions

When my children were young, we kept Easter as a holy, religious holiday. We had our traditions, which the kids knew and looked forward to. They did get new outfits, special “Easter” clothes to wear to church, which they wore on Palm Sunday and Easter. I always believed in dressing children up for church. Not to show off to others how beautiful my kids were, but as a sign of respect to God. Remember how upset so many people got when a high school girl wore flip-flops to see the President? She hadn’t thought she’d done anything wrong, but the office of the Presidency commands a certain respect, even if we have a president we’re not particularly fond of at the time. If we don’t show respect to a judge in a courtroom, we can be put in jail. We should show respect to our elders, our employer, and even our neighbors. As far as I’m concerned, the real three “r’s” our children should learn are NOT reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic, but respect, resourcefulness, and responsibility.

So starting the night before Palm Sunday, the kids all had baths. They polished up their shoes, laid out their new outfits, and because we are Catholic, they also went to confession when they had reached a certain age. Then in the morning we’d get all dressed up in our finest and attend church together. We always attended church; it wasn’t just something we did on holidays. But after Mass, we would return home for a big family brunch. Our menu might have varied, but was usually something like bacon, sausage muffins, hashbrowns, hardboiled and dyed Easter eggs, chocolates and Champagne (adults only).

Then in the afternoon, we would do something nice and appropriate as a family. We might visit an animal park or zoo, or good friends. One year it was cold and rainy, so we just played games together. When we lived in Oklahoma, we almost certainly went to Woolaroc.

Easter Coincides with Spring, the Season of New Birth

Then came Holy Week. My husband sang in the choir, so I’d sit in the pews with the children on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Vigil Mass, and then Easter morning. It was a lot of church for youngsters, but they did learn how very important these holy days are. We encouraged them to give up something for Lent, although children under the age of 13 are not required to fast. Often they would chose to give up soda or chocolate, so both would be served at the Easter brunch. The concept is to teach them about sacrifice. How hard it is to give up something we want – like how Jesus gave up His life! Then when they would really crave that thing they gave up – when they’d see a chocolate bar at the grocery store and they really wanted it – it would remind us to pray, and remember God.

Our Family Easter Egg Hung

When my youngest child turned three, we decided to attend the community Easter Egg hunt. I had never done anything with Easter eggs before, although the children always colored eggs for an art project. But for some reason I thought this might be a fun activity. So we drove to the park exactly at the advertised time, only to find that it was all over. They had scattered several hundred candy-filled plastic eggs, but had so many children show up that they started a minute early and it lasted exactly a minute. My youngest was in tears. One volunteer handed me a garbage bag full of empty plastic eggs and apologized. I ran to the grocery store, bought a few bags of candies, and took my brood back home. We filled the eggs together, and then I hid them in the back yard and let them all hunt for them. Ever since, it has also become a family tradition. The Easter Egg hunt can still be a learning activity, if we teach our children that we should always seek God in our daily lives.

I never gave my children a gift at Easter, other than the small basket of candy. And they only got enough candy that they could eat in a day or two. They grew up knowing that I loved them, and that God loves them. And that is the best gift a parent can ever give their child.

For further reading, you might try:
Building Family Through Tradition
Egg Laying Rabbits and Other Nonsense
Easter is Coming!
And be sure to check out the Easter Lesson Plans.

Photo Credits:
Top: photo by Wealtheow1
Middle:photo by Hoyasmeg
Bottom: photo by Betsy Nierderer

Egg Laying Rabbits and other nonsense

Lorelei Sieja — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 16:59:05 +0000

Some People Decorate Trees at Easter and Halloween, Too

Easter is fast approaching. The stores are bursting with brightly colored baskets, synthetic grasses and plastic eggs filled with high-fructose corn syrup, sugar, gelatin and preservatives. It bears a striking resemblance to the Christmas hoopla of only a few months ago. For many homes, Easter has become a second Christmas with egg-decorated trees and presents underneath.

Building family traditions is very important for a healthy, happy family, as I posted earlier here. I am not suggesting that we desecrate the Easter Bunny, only that we take a moment to consider the origins of certain customs and make a conscious decision whether to assimilate these into our lives rather than merely allowing Wal-Mart to dictate our holidays.

Why You Celebrate Easter

Easter is the Christian celebration of the resurrection of Christ. It occurs at the same time as the Jewish festival of the Passover. The word, “easter”, however, does not occur anywhere in the Bible. It may come from the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring “Eostre”. In non-English speaking cultures, the word for “Easter” comes from “pasch”, for the Passover.

The rabbit is also from the Anglo-Saxon pagan customs. The rabbit has always been seen as a symbol of new life and fertility. We still unkindly say of couples who have a lot of children that they “breed like rabbits”. According to legend, the goddess Eostre became angry with her consort, the rabbit, and threw him into the heavens where he became the constellation Lepus the Hare, at the foot of Orion. Interestingly enough, the word “east” and “estrus” also come from the word eostre. The goddess granted Lepus the gift of laying eggs once a year, which is why we have a rabbit delivering eggs.

Easter Eggs are Pagan in Origin

Ukrainian Style Decorated Eggs

Easter eggs are also pagan in origin. Many ancient cultures worshiped the sun, as it warmed the earth and was the source of life. Birds were often honored as only they could go near the sun god, so eggs were believed to have special powers. In the long, dreary days of winter in the Ukraine, eggs were intricately decorated, then given to family members and respected outsiders as a symbol of new life – which is why the egg must remain whole. The Early Christian Church incorporated the egg into their tradition, not as a symbol of nature’s rebirth, but of man’s.

Giving chocolate rabbits is a fairly new, and consumerist tradition. Jelly beans are also only loosely related to Easter, as they have no new life within and cannot symbolize anything other than the sugar high our children get from consuming them. That said, we did celebrate Easter with hunting for eggs in my home!

Community Easter Egg Hunts

One year I decided to take my youngest child to the community Easter Egg hunt. She was maybe three years old, and not overly addicted to sugar. (She used to hold the sucker part and chew on the stick!). We arrived at the site on a sunny Saturday morning in April all of thirty seconds late, and the hunt was over! The community grossly underestimated the number of children who would show up. There were plastic eggs discarded everywhere, with empty paper candy wrappers blowing in the wind, and the crowd was already dispersing.

My youngster cried big, silent tears, feeling she had missed out on something, and my older children were outraged. A kind city volunteer scooped up some empty eggs and gave them to me. She said I could take them and refill them myself. I thanked her, ran to Wal-Mart, and a new family tradition was born.

Now every Easter I fill plastic eggs with jelly beans and chocolate to hide around our house or yard – inside if there is still snow on the ground (we live up north!) or outside if the weather cooperates. It is my husband’s job to hide the eggs while I prepare a large Sunday brunch – a weekly tradition in our house, but the Christmas and Easter brunch menus are much fancier. We have Sausage muffins, hard-boiled Easter eggs, a fruit bowl with melon and whatever is available, champagne (my kids are older, but the grandbaby gets juice), and of course, chocolate! We would have gone to church first, so by brunch time we have quite an appetite.

We never talked about an Easter bunny. My kids never really believed in Santa Claus, either. We don’t celebrate Halloween at all, nor do we send Valentines. I wasn’t lazy, I just didn’t feel that these were important elements for our family traditions. But my kids love Easter Sunday, and even as young adults, they still want to look for their eggs.

Hunting For Easter Eggs

If you decide to include Easter eggs, jelly beans and plastic grass into your family traditions, that’s fine. Just think about what you want your children to learn from the holiday, and include some sort of explanation that fits with your family beliefs.

For more information:
Importance of Easter Customs .
Easter: History, Meaning and Observance .
And for pretty Easter eggs to color, try Pysanky Coloring Book Pages

Photo credits:
Easter Tree by krisdecurtis
Traditional eggs by Scilit
Easter Egg Hunt by dplanet