Easter16

As a child Easter was a significant religious event in my life, but since my early 20s I have struggled to find meaning in this particular holiday. For a brief period I tried celebrating seasonal equinoxes and solstices, which meant celebrating Easter in October and Halloween in April, but I found going against the cultural grain too challenging to maintain my stamina. Instead, Easter has become a fun, but spiritually and seasonally meaningless celebration. As I grow older I care less about this, because I get so much pleasure from seeing the joy our eclectic Easter celebrations bring the children.

Each year since Gaia was three we have decorated eggs. Usually this involves hard boiling and then painting with food dye. We attempted a not entire successful (though, entirely fun!) drip method this year, as well as using paint brushes. In past years we've used felt, shaving cream with dye spots and simply dipping eggs in egg cups full of colouring. The kids look forward to this tradition. In related news: Frida's fingers are still green.

We use these colourful eggs for our hunts. We strayed from tradition this year by adding small chocolate eggs to the egg hunt. Well, you can imagine how fast the children ditched the hunt for the dyed eggs for chocolate! We also gave them the Lion King soundtrack to play while we're in the car.

This year we added two new traditions. After years of meaning to, but failing, we finally got around to crafting some Easter bonnets. They turned out absolutely adorable! Gaia kindly hand sewed the girls each a small felt bag to collect their tiny chocolate eggs in (pictured below).

The second new tradition was an afternoon of family atheletics. It started with an egg and spoon race which became a frog race, a regular race, stacks on and horsey rides on one another. Lots of infectious laughter. Our best Easter yet, and rather quiet at that.

Happy Easter from our little bunnies...and carrot.