Happy Easter

As a kid there were two great holidays: Halloween and Easter. Sure I liked the more traditional kid favorites, Christmas and birthday, but even as a kid I really didn't desire a lot of things. Plus those two were always marred by formality and over-scheduling. Christmas always started something like:
7:00 open stockings
7:30 get dressed in itchy and uncomfortable nice clothes
8:00 Grandma Dorothy arrives for breakfast
8:30 eat breakfast
9:00 clean up all dishes and living room stuff before other relatives get to our house or before we go to another relatives house

There was no written schedule that we actually followed, but it always seemed like we were trying to cram way too much into a single day in the efforts to make it special. Birthdays weren't much different as you had to fit cake, a silly party game and gifts into a two hour party. And for me, as a shy and awkward kid (as opposed to the shy and awkward adult I am now), I didn't really want to be the center of attention. And then as soon as Christmas and birthdays were over, we had to write meaningful and heartfelt thank-you notes to everyone who had given us a gift, which was especially hard if you didn't like the gift.

And so I preferred holidays like Halloween when you could get creative with a costume, spend a fun night running around the neighborhood, and then enjoy a huge candy stash for the month of November. Easter in our house also came with a fun set of traditions: Easter baskets, the county egg hunt, a color coded egg hunt at home, and a treasure hunt. My mom went out of her way to make us kids run as much as possible tracking down clues like,"look in the mailbox," until we finally came to the easter stash. As we got older, there was less running involved but the clues became more cryptic, so that sometimes we had to look in multiple places before figuring out that "Aloha, Proffitts" really meant look behind the picture of our family in Hawaii.

Wanting to carry these traditions on with Megan, I lamented this morning that I wished I had another week to get ready for Easter. "Don't worry," Mac assured me, "Easter is the least important of all the holidays." How could he? "That's because you were Catholic, " I shot back, "so easter wasn't fun for you." To emphasize my point Mac broke out into Christian song: "Jesus was born and Jesus has risen" blah, blah, blah, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus (that's what I remember about it anyway).

I did have some Easter reservations for Megan, though. As a parent, how can I make Easter special without feeding her a lot of sugar of getting a bunch of gifts so that she comes to expect stuff to make things special. I finally decided against traditional Easter candy (that's right no Peeps!) for two of Megan's routine favorites: a bag of M&M's and a bas of skittle (or as Megan says,"M's" and "S's" for the letters on the candies). I divvied the bags up with only a few pieces in each egg. And then I rounded things out with a few items from the dollar store: Dora sock, a coloring book, a new puzzle (Liam got a car and a top) and then I caved and got a few chocolate bunnies.

But Megan LOVED the treasure hunt: look in the bathtub, look under the sink, look in your pajama drawer. Megan ran excitedly from place to place until she got to the end (and Mac followed excitedly ;) so that he could read the clues to Megan). And I watched excitedly as a family Easter tradition was passed on to the next generation. Happy Easter.