I'm not the most creative mom when it comes to cool holiday traditions. I love great traditions, but honestly, I just dont' have the energy to pull it off most of the time. I would love to have an Easter Week that is centered on the Savior and is the spiritual highlight of the season and culminates in the great symbolic Easter dinner with the kids all talking about everything they learned... but it has never happened. Thankfully, Jonah comes in where I fall short, and he does much to help us all focus on the significance of the holiday by reading scriptures and passages from Jesus the Christ by James Talmage to us during the week.
We have been trying for a couple of years to do all the Easter egg hunts and basket hoopla on Saturday, but we've had packed Easter Saturday schedules for the last few years and haven't been able to do it... yet. But for now, we at least managed to have a calm and simple Easter celebration, keeping with a few traditions we've picked up over the years.
For example, the Easter Bunny leaves a yarn tied to your bedpost and tangled in a web all over the house, leading you to your Easter basket. It's pretty crazy if you get up in the night to use the bathroom. You have to be very very careful. It's like Mission: Impossible-style ducking under the laser beams.
Ana was happy to get some candy and a new leotard in her basket.
Elsie gave Jonah and I a card. I love that the speech bubbles have many hearts in them, which means, according to Elsie, "You and I always talk about how much we love each other!". Jonah is the little bunny on the left side of the page.
The kids had an outdoor Easter egg hunt after church. We have a great yard for egg hunts...
But the chickens were not amused.
Here are our eggs. Jonah put some scripture references on one of the eggs, which we read through after the egg hunt.
And then Jonah completed my favorite Easter tradition... making deviled eggs. Actually, my favorite traditions is eating deviled eggs. Jonah did all the hard work in order for the rest of us to enjoy the tradition.
We went to our friends' house for dinner and a nice reading of the Easter story through discovering the meaning of many of the Easter symbols. (Can you tell that Ana loves Po?)
It was a nice Easter after all. Some year we will get around to trying some more in-depth activities, but for now, I guess our main tradition is simplicity.