A Resurrection Egg Hunt

I recently learnt that in many developed countries that Easter is celebrated, children expect the Easter bunny to bring them presents. This year, the big uproar is because Disney had not produced enough Elsa and Anna dolls and mums were wailing about how their daughters would be so upset that the Easter bunny didn't bring them dolls from Frozen.

When I eventually picked up my eyeballs that had rolled so hard they fell out of my eyes, I decided that even though I had started a tradition of doing an Easter egg hunt with JED, I was going to make sure that it at least had something to do with Easter. And no way was I going to buy them Easter bunny gifts.

So this was my way of making slightly less pagan and commercialized and slightly more Christian.

---Somewhat Christian activity to follow--

How to make an Easter Egg Hunt about the Crucifixion and the Resurrection .

1. Find 12 empty plastic eggs. (It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be because I had procrastinated and the eggs sold out. I also discovered this morning that individually wrapped chocolate easter eggs sold out too!).

2. Print out the relevant verses and the reason for the little symbols. This was a great blog guide for them.

3. Play scavenger hunt in the middle of the night round the house looking for the items from the printed verses. We had to find
a. Some palm leaves
b. A piece of bread
c. Silver Coins
d. Guaze, purple marker and something to fashion a crown from. (The remnant palm leaves twisted into a ring)
e. Something to make a whip ( I settled for an old shoe strap)
f. Tooth picks to make a cross
g. Nails (The carpentry kind)
h. Cardboard to make a sign "This is the King of Jews"
i. Sponge and another tooth pick to make a spear.
j. Spices (Cinnamon. I could have sworn I had cloves and star anise somewhere but at midnight, the effort was too great)
k. A stone

It's true. There are only items for 11 eggs here. The 12th egg was meant to be empty. And a good thing we left it so because that was the one egg that Packrat hid so well that no one found it.

4. Hide them all over the garden together with some boiled and coloured quail eggs just to mix it up a little.

5. Send the troops out to look for the eggs with specific instructions that the boys were to look for the green eggs and the girls the yellow ones. They were told that it wasn't a competition. They had to work amongst themselves to find their eggs and work together to find the 12 special ones. It meant the girls told the boys where the green eggs were and the boys gave the girls the yellow ones they found. They kept coming together to count whether they had the 12 necessary eggs to end the hunt. We called off the hunt when it was obvious that the 12th egg had disappeared like the plane in the ocean.

6. Report the finds and open the eggs, trying to explain the symbolism behind the different eggs. There were funny responses like "the palm leaves were waved by Jesus to say Hi" and the tomb was empty because "Jesus escaped". But we discovered that amongst the 5 of them, they actually had quite a bit of the Resurrection story internalised.

So, that was that. The JED kids and cousins had a lot of fun, ate some and learnt a little about the day. That, in my book was a pretty good Friday.