Traditional Easter Celebrations

The Resurrection of Christ three days after he was crucified on the cross is the reason we celebrate the Easter holiday. The Catholic Church celebrates lent which starts on Ash Wednesday and lasts for 40 days and 40 nights. During this time they either give up something they think they can't live without, practice abstinence or fast. There are also pre lent celebrations in which they celebrate to excess the most famous known as Mardi gras.

For those of us who are not catholic Easter is either about the day Jesus was raised from the dead or getting candy and going on Easter egg hunts. For some of us it is both the Saturday before Easter you dye your Easter eggs, and on Sunday morning you get your basket full of candy that you then use to hunt for eggs. Lots of us go to church on Easter Sunday and partake in the Lord's Supper, where you eat a piece of unlevin bread representing Jesus' flesh and you drink grape juice, representing Jesus' blood. After this ritual is complete, you are considered washed clean of sins, and you are whole again.

In our family for as long as I can remember we did the both. Easter at church was always a big deal. It was the one Sunday where you had a special new dress, new shoes, and new tights or panty hose. Our family went to church every Sunday but Easter Sunday was the biggest Sunday of the year. The night before after we would dye Easter eggs my sisters and I would roll our hair with the goody foam rollers and sleep very uncomfortably all night long just so we would have the perfect Shirley Temple curls for Easter Morning at church.

Another night before tradition as I mentioned above was the boiling and dyeing of our Easter eggs. We would boil a dozen eggs and dye them all with our PAAS egg dyeing kits. One year we even painted them with little brushes and made very intricate designs so they would look like Faberge eggs that year we were up almost all night decorating Easter eggs, we didn't do it again. The next day our dad would hide them and we used our baskets we got from the Easter bunny that morning to find them. We always used real eggs, but I heard from friends that they used hollow plastic eggs that were either filled with money or candy.

Easter baskets were always brought to our kitchen table by the Easter bunny and would be there when we awoke on Sunday morning. Sometimes they were the premade baskets you saw all month long in the store, sometimes they were made by your mom. Either way they were there for you when you awoke and filled with Peeps, Cadbury eggs, chocolate bunnies, or those candy coated eggs that were filled with marshmallow.

These days I have to work on Sundays so my Easters are very different with my children. We do dye Easter eggs the night before, and we do hunt for them on Easter Sunday, but we don't have Easter baskets dropped off by a fictional bunny. We also sit down with the Bible on Sundays, since I don't really go to church anymore and I read to them the story of the crucifixion and how Jesus was resurrected three days later. These are my new traditions that I hope my sons will also carryon to their families.