When we lived in New England it was common to leave a carrot out for the Easter bunny. I always left it on the back porch and it was gone the next morning. Sneaky bunny got it.
Dad always got it after I went to bed. So that I wasn’t disappointed.
Any traditions in your family or the region where you live? When did you have the Easter egg hunt? Early in the morning or after Church? Did your mom always buy a new Easter dress for herself and daughters?
I remember one year it rained and mom hid the eggs in the house. It was fun.
We always have a giant hollow chocolate bunny on the table, and after dinner a family member is selected to smash him so we can all partake in the chocolaty shards. It’s tons of fun to watch an octogenarian crush a chocolate bunny head in her hands.
I always make the rolls for family dinners. Being a baker I don’t want any of that brown-n-serve crap.
For Easter though it must alway be my home made croissants. See, about twenty-five years ago, on the Saturday night before Easter, my father had a heart attack. In the wee small hours of Sunday morning I was in the hospital waiting room, along with the rest of the family, waiting for news on my dad.
I looked around at everyone and we were a bunch of zombies. Nobody was talking, just staring blankly into space. So I went home and got the croissants I’d made for dinner that day(it was my first try at croissants), along with butter and jelly and plates, and brought them back to the hospital. Eating perks people up and they seemed to break people out of their trances. Now I have to make them on Easter.
And BTW, my dad recovered nicely, although at one point Sunday afternoon he coded. Said he woke up and a nurse was beating him on the chest, hollering “H-----, wake up!” But as he put it later, “If I had died, what better day than Easter?” I even was in church that morning
Easter was very much Not A Big Deal. We’d usually dye eggs the night before and have an egg hunt Sunday morning (candy-filled plastic ones). The dyed ones were used during the next week for weird-colored egg salad due to some of the dye leaking through the shells. For some reason our parents saw this as an opportunity to give us a few presents too.
We’d usually then go to Meeting for Worship, which wasn’t any different from any other Sunday. They’d have a dyed egg hunt after, with teams of adults and kids hunting for a single color of egg (e.g. a group of adults and kids looking for green eggs, another for yellow, etc.)
For dinner we’d have a nice sit-down. No particular food that I remember. When we lived near relatives we sometimes went elsewhere for dinner.
Coloring eggs was a big deal when we were kids. What kicked it up a notch was, two years, we got first baby ducks, then baby rabbits. That was less horrifyingly inappropriate in the early 70’s as it is now – giving baby farm animals to 5 year olds who have a 3 -foot wide urban back yard isn’t cool these days. And yet, I still long to revive the tradition for the kids I know. Or do it to their parents, depending how you want to look at it.
Petco doesn’t sell live mammals. They do, however, let animal rescue groups hold adoption fairs at their stores. It wouldn’t be unlikey for those groups to have rabbits available for adoption. Although probably not at Easter time.
We would dye eggs the day before and my mother would hide them for me to find in the morning. In the house.
A sub-optimal way to do an egg hunt. One year we finally found one of the eggs in May.
For my own daughter I’ve decided to hide plastic eggs. I can’t figure out what the point of dyeing real ones is, then… maybe just as an arts-n-crafts project. With lots of egg salad afterward.
Oops, color my face red. :smack: Perusing Petco’s website, they do indeed sell small animals. That’ll teach me to post without researching the facts first. Sorry, everybody, I thought they would be more enlightened than that. Apparently they’re not.
We have an egg hunt, using whatever mini eggs I get round to buying. This year it has been Milky Bar minis, which don’t have a foil wrap, but at least have a hard shell so they don’t melt on my carpet. It’s my 20 month old’s first experience, and she loved it. Didn’t like the eggs, but loved the collection and has carried her little basket round with her all day. Very cute.
My 6 year old, who is scary smart and a born scientist, in most things, has decided that the eggs are left by the Easter bunny. I can’t work this out - we’ve never told her this, and the Easter bunny isn’t really a big thing in the UK. We do put the eggs out once the girls are in bed, but still… It’s gone so far with her that she excitedly reported to me that they don’t have the bunny in France, they have a bell. Or a mouse. I forget what she told me. When I replied “what a lovely story!” She was very indignant and insisted it wasn’t a story, any more than the bunny is, but true. She’s a strange and wonderful creature.
Other than the hunt, which takes about 10 minutes, our tradition is to massively overeat chocolate all day. The old ones are always the best.
The egg tradition in my family used to be that, on Saturday, any kids present would dye eggs, then overnight the Easter Bunny would hide them all in the house (plus one in each Easter basket) and the “older kids” (i.e., 7 or 8) would find them in the house. Then, the older kids would take them all outside and re-hide them in the yard, and the “younger kids” (maybe 4-ish) would hunt for them out there. That tradition faded away as we got older, though, and honestly probably didn’t last for more than 4 or 5 years anyway (though, at that age, that seemed like forever).
The one tradition that we’ve kept is dandelion salad. See, dandelion greens are wonderful, but they’re only good early in the spring before the blossoms appear, and then they’re a lot of work to clean. So we only have it once a year, at Easter time. Gramma’s recipe takes the greens, adds boiled potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and chopped onions, and then right before serving you pour on a hot dressing of bacon grease, cider vinegar, and sugar. You can substitute butter for the bacon for vegetarians, or endive for dandelion if it’s out of season, but it’s just not the same. I’ve had that salad literally every Easter of my life, and I intend to continue to do so.
We never did egg hunts. My mother would make up an easter basket for me, and hide the entire thing. I always looked forward to searching for it.
I usually ended up wearing a dress that day(can’t remember if it was always a new one, though). We’d go to church in the morning, then my grandparents’ house for a ham dinner with all the aunts, uncles, and cousins. And one year I climbed around in a barn, trying to get a peek at some newborn kittens, and ruined my dress. That’s really my only specific easter memory.
Always made/make a simpler version of psanky dyed eggs, to be used later for devilled eggs and pickled eggs (ugh.)
We’d hunt for plastic filled eggs and chocolate eggs hidden in the house and our filled Easter baskets would be hidden as well. It was often too rainy or cold for outside hunts.
Traditional lunch/early dinner of ham, keilbasa, some kind of potato bake or maybe pierogis and 2 different egg molds, homemade cottage cheese, Easter bread we call “Paska” and devilled eggs. Followed by nut roll and poppyseed roll. Yum!
I try to do much the same for my kids now - dyed psanky eggs, indoor hunt, Easter lunch. I don’t usually make all those traditional things each year, but I make some. Then we eat ourselves silly. Our neighborhood does a yearly egg hunt in our front yards. This year 2 of us filled 560 eggs! We stand around in the heat drinking mimosas while the kids run around. It’s a blast.
My family would dress up and we would go have Easter breakfast. And then we would paint our own eggs with food coloring and what not, then go hide them and hunt them down My son is 10 months right now, but next year I can’t wait to start the traditions for him as well
When we were kids, we dyed eggs, and built our own Easter baskets from goodies that Mom bought for us. We always got new shoes, a new hat, new dresses, and new purses, and because we had a gorgeous garden, there are tons of photos of us in front of Mom’s flowers. Never any egg hunts, tho. And after church, we’d go to the cemetery to leave flowers on family plots, then to the grandparents’ house for more goodies.
For our daughter, we’d leave her a basket of goodies, but I don’t think she and I ever dyed eggs. We were never big church-goers, so new clothes weren’t an issue. Nor did we hide eggs for her. We’d usually go to the inlaws’ house for dinner. This year, our daughter is in Orlando for a job interview and my husband and I went to my mom’s for dinner with the family. My mom got a chocolate bunny for everyone, and I made dyed deviled eggs - they were a big hit! But most traditions have pretty much faded away.
