Easter traditions?

My friend would always cut Easter Bunny 'paws' from sponges and stamp her back porch..as if the EB had just walked up the steps. If you have carpet you could also do the same thing with Flour. I always thought this was so cute and now that I have a daughter of my own I will do the same thing! just a fun little addition to the normal basket & eggs.
Enjoy....
Amie

As a child, my father always mowed the lawn very close to Easter (never on Good Friday though -that day was sacred - we weren't allowed to do anything!) and then on Easter Sunday, before church we would have a hunt in the garden for Easter eggs (colored boiled eggs) and goodies. The Easter bunny always made real grass nests and there would be muddy paw prints on the sidewalk! What a wonderous surprise it was! As grandparents, they continued that tradition with my own children.
Happy Easter to you and your family.

The Easter Bunny doesn't bring a lot of candy to our house. One of my sons is allergic to peanuts so that eliminates most chocolates and jelly beans. Instead, the EB hides eggs with change in them...mostly pennies, but a few surprises of dimes, nickels and quarters too. They really love finding all the eggs and then counting up their loot. LOL We fill their baskets with lots of outside stuff...chalk, sidewalk paint, bubbles, water balloons, etc.
When I was a kid, my grandma painted hundreds of small rocks and hid them all over her farm. My cousins and I used to love searching for them. It literally took hours to find them all, which looking back was probably the point--kept us all out of the house and busy for a long time. LOL

Isn't this a fun age for Easter?! We always decorate eggs a couple of days ahead of time. Then, on Easter morning, when the kids wake up, each of them has a trail of jelly beans leading from their bedrooms doors down the stairs and into our living room. The Easter bunny leaves their baskets in the middle of the floor with just a few jelly beans in the bottom. The kids have collected their trail of jelly beans and put those into the basket, too. They then have to do a hunt around the room for their plastic eggs filled with small candies, coins, etc... Some of the eggs are very visible for the little one(s) and some are very hard to find. They enjoy the hunt sooooo much!!!! And they have to cooperate and make sure that they each have the same number of eggs - so, that throws in some math and equality lessons, too. ;)

When my daughter was real little we had a very inventive neighbor who left bunny tracks for every house down our street to each kids home. She used white shoe polish and did little bunny tracks on everyones porch the coolest and most memorable thing for my daughter.

I don't think I have ever not dyed eggs for Easter since I was old enough to do it. The excitement was always in the hunting. since we have lived in areas where the weather can be a bit unpredictable, we usually do some inside and some out. Newer rules developed the year we forgot to count exactly how many we hid for the children inside. Yes, you guessed it, we discovered we had forgotten one when we had to play track down that smell a few weeks later! Only plastic eggs in the house now! Guess I always remember the year that my Mom finally fooled my sister and I. She was pretty good at hiding them, and we always wanted more to find. She had made a ceramic basket and eggs that were always on the table. so, she used those eggs that year too for us to have more. Well, for the first time we couldn't find the last one despite multiple clues of getting warmer etc. Crazy woman had used a clothes pin in the hole on the bottom of the egg to attach it to the clothes line! That was the only year Mom won. Now I try to find the crazy places to hide them too. Always candy in the basket and plastic eggs with a toy or two for silly fun as well. Thanks for reminding me of good times!

We'll throw out the eggs all over the back yard (now that we have a really big back yard to do it in). This year, our son Jackson is getting Baptised on Easter Sunday (that's just how it fell) so we will have a big party and put these out on the table: http://jas.familyfun.go.com/crafts?page=CraftDisplay&craftid=11412

We're dying eggs on Friday as well :0)
Since we both have family in town, we usually spend Saturday with my parents and Sunday with my husband's family.
Usually small egg hunts on both days with the cousins.
Always mass in the morning on Sunday.
We will have an Easter basket for Evan full of goodies on Easter morning as well with a small egg hunt in the house.
Last year he had five egg hunts total before Easter was over but he didn't seem to mind (lol)

as a kid my parents always hid foil covered chocolate eggs all over the inside of the house. some were hard to find some were easy but i always remember all the silly and inventive places my parents hid the eggs, now I have fun hiding eggs for my kids. Also my children receive lots of play outside in the nice spring weather, toothbrushes and their summer bathing suits flip flops, towels and goggles.
Have fun!
I love reading all the other traditions, there are some great ideas out there.
rochelle

This is kind of corny, but we have an egg tree. We would go look for the perfect branch for the tree and my dad would spray paint it silver (in the 70s mind you) and we would hang decorated eggs from the branches. Now we just use the natural branch. My mom would poke little holes in each end of the egg and blow the yoke out so the eggs were very fragile. Then we would hand decorate them with the dye that came in the little bottles. No dipping for us! She still has some that we made as kids. They are so funny to see. She still hangs them each year. We would put our names on them and names of our pets. We haven't decorated eggs in long time, but we still have the tree each year.

when i was a kid, our neighbor would always leave big, white, giant-bunny-shaped footprints on our front walk in flour, leading to and from the Easter baskets. It was a treat!

Wish I could share my Easter decorations with all of you because I've worked so hard to make some great vintage-inspired decorations with my scrapbooking supplies, but alas...no blog or website.

Here's what I do that I got from my husband's aunt - using flour and a wet paper towel I make marks on the floor that look like rabbit prints. The kids totally believe it and I complain about that rabbit making a mess in my house!!
There were a couple of mornings that I woke up and I had forgotten to do it!!! you've never seen a crazier woman running around at 5am making rabbit prints!!!

It has become the tradition, in my family, to attend a sunrise service, usually held at 6 or 7 a.m. and to then have breakfast at church.
This tradition started when I was in my very early teens and has lasted until last year (it is kind of hard to manage with a toddler).However much I complained about such an early hour when I could be sleeping in when I was young, it is probably the tradition that I miss the most as an adult.

we hide the basket and leave clues for our daughter to find. The past few years Alex (my daughter) and I make Easter breakfast/or dinner together. We also color Easter eggs the same day and leave them out for the Easter bunny as thanks for the basket of goodies. Even though she's 12 this year she still loves all this:)

Hi Ali,
of course we decorate eggs with as many family members that are willing to participate. :) Also, the Easter Bunny does come to our house, but while we are sleeping and hides the baskets full of goodies. We try to limit gifts to small toys and candies. Madison hates sweets so I get her a dvd and some type of ball. We also do a family egg hunt on Easter morning after breakfast. Not sure how much longer Hayden is going to want to participate in this.....but finding the eggs with the golden dollars may keep him interested.
xo
M

Last year I took 3 or 4 skeins of yarn and created a giant yarn maze that criss-crossed through the whole house. It covered upstairs and downstairs, the kitchen, dining room, bonus room etc - just not the kids bedrooms cause I didn't want to wake them up. So when the kids woke up in the mornng not only did they have to try and find their Easter Basket (cause the bunny hides them) but they had to climb over and under a maze of yarn. I started it to make the fun last a little bit longer and to make up for my dh being out of town.
Our Easter Bunny also hides plastic eggs filled with $1 bills instead of candy (There's already candy in their baskets -jelly beans, peeps and a choc bunny.) Each child gets to find 10 plastic eggs. Although this year I may do the new dollar coins.
Oh and at the end of the maze there is usually a small game/toy that the kids share. This is how I got them to wind up all the yarn maze mess that I've created. The only way to find the prize was to wind it up and see where it ended.
p.s. Last year the kids groaned about the maze, but this year they started hinting real early that they sure hope that bunny does it again beacuse it was the most fun ever. So I guess it's a keeper.

We have always hid our kids baskets just as our parents did when we were young. We decorate eggs either Friday or Sat after having homemade pizza. One other tradition, which isn't very original is HAM. We always have a nice ham dinner with homemade au gratins for my husband and son and dumplings for myself and my daughter.
Have fun finding your own family traditions!

"The Easter Bunny" only did this once, but I've never forgotten it. When I woke up on Easter morning there was a trail of peeps and jelly beans from my bed to the kitchen, and my basket was at the end of the trail. Also, my mother always put a lot of stuff in our baskets--not just candy.

My mom would hide our easter baskets in the morning, so we would have to look for them.
The night before we would leave out some lettuce and carrot for the Easter bunny. In the morning the carrot would be half eaten and the lettuce had bunny bites out of it.
My grandparents would do an egg hunt with plastic eggs filled with dimes, quarters and nickels. One or two would have a dollar in them. They would hide them in the yard and all the kids would look for them.
Fun stuff!