Easter Celebrations

Ha! Just as you thought the flood of Easter posts was over, I bring you yet another! Easter is awesome. (And let's just establish right now that by Easter I mean Resurrection Sunday.) Even the pagans love it, but for different reasons. I love Easter not because it celebrates spring, heralding in a bout of terrible allergies and bright colors, but because Christ died on the cross and rose again. Life would be pointless without the resurrection.

Everyone celebrates Easter differently. And for Christians I think it can be hard to find the balance between celebrating the world's version of Easter and our version. My family tends to change it up a little each time, but here's what happened this year. :)

For us, the festivities always start on what my brothers call Easter Eve. Mom went to the store on the night of Good Friday and already our HEB Plus was out of most dessert and smallish hams. A friend gave us a lamb roast because she said there was something wrong with eating ham on Easter ;) But Mom still wanted ham, so we ended up with 20 pounds of it. 20 pounds! And we have to lug it up and down the stairs to our garage fridge every time we want some . . .

Anyway, we had plenty of meat :) Saturday afternoon we dusted off the plastic Easter eggs and opened the bags of candy. We limited ourselves to Reeses Eggs, Robin Eggs, mini KitKats (added later), and jelly beans in sour and Jolly Rancher flavors. All of this candy I can pass up without much trouble . . . until I get started. Hehe. We dumped all of the candy into a large bowl and stuffed the many, many eggs.

Next up was dying eggs. This is my favorite activity and I was quite proud of how mine turned out this year! Nothing fancy, just boiled eggs and a dye kit, but so much fun! After they were all displayed in the egg carton for a few hours, we peeled all the pretty shell off so Mom could make deviled eggs and seven layer salad (lettuce and spinach, green onion, bacon, frozen peas, Miracle Whip and sour cream, boiled egg, and Parmesan cheese!).

I'm pretty sure that's all we did for Saturday.

Sunday morning we made resurrection rolls. We started this tradition a few years ago and oh my goodness! They are so yummy. Crescent rolls with butter and cinnamon that you seal around a marshmallow. When you bake them, the marshmallow melts leaving an empty tomb when you tear it open :D

Then, of course, was the church service. I was a little bummed my allergies had stolen my voice because we sang some good Easter songs. Everyone was all dressed up; the men in full suits and the ladies in new dresses. (Yes, I still like to get a new dress for Easter). This year mine was a gauzy white maxi that I wore with a pink belt. We had lilies at the front of the church (gag!) that everyone got to take home after the service was over. I had the nice excuse not to touch them because I didn't want the pollen all over my dress ;)

After the service came the lunch, of course! Ham, lamb, and seven layer salad with deviled eggs, all of which Mom managed to prepare that morning and somehow she still made it to church (but we did take the baby for the Sunday School hour). Oh my heavens, it was good. The adults opted for the egg hunt before naps, so we "big kids" got on that.

It became the tradition a year or two ago for the three oldest kids to get to hide the eggs for the younger four. Then we dump all the candy into one big bowl instead of keeping it divided. Hiding the eggs is really fun. I like to make them difficult. I put one on top of a supposedly dead ant bed and another I dropped down into our tangle of dewberry vines. And then there's always putting them out of reach, too :) But we had to make some a little easier for the little boys. Everett (18 months) loved the hunt. It took him a while to get the hang of putting the eggs in his basket, instead of just holding them all. And every few eggs he stopped to eat candy.

That basically sums it up. We had lemon cake and candy afterwards and then naps. We didn't watch an Easter movie this year, but we have watched Jesus of Nazareth in the past. We had seen Risen several weeks before, and I highly recommend it if you're wondering about it! It encapsulated the importance of the resurrection and the effect it might have had on a centurion who crucified Jesus. And that is the true meaning of Easter. He died and rose again that He might give us life! The rest of the world will never be able to understand just how important Easter is.

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I hope everyone's Easter was as good as mine! How does your family celebrate? Have you seen Risen yet? I'll be doing my monthly wrap-up on Thursday, so stay tuned :D