Celebrating Easter One Egg at a Time

We moved to a rural acreage when our oldest kids were five and three and our youngest not yet born. We were so excited to have ten acres for the kids to run around, get grubby, grow a garden, and—yes, I actually thought of this when buying the house—hunt for Easter Eggs.

That first year I bought 150 plastic eggs. We filled them with candy and cute erasers and spent an hour hiding them in the front and back yards. Then we invited around 20 kids and instructed each child to find a certain number of eggs, thus giving everyone an equal amount of fun. The older kids raced to the far backyard, where the eggs were spaced further apart in more challenging locations.

The younger kids ran around nearer the house and, as it turned out, were far more successful at finding eggs than the backyard kids. They missed so many eggs that we found some a year later, scratched and bitten by wild animals.

As time passed, we repeated our egg hunt—adding more eggs each year—until our kids were too “grown up” to invite friends over for the hunt. We still hid a few eggs near the house for just our family. Lucy, our youngest, continued the tradition when we moved into town. But last year, after hiding a few eggs around the house, she forgot to tell anyone that she’d hidden them. I found brightly-colored eggs in random spots for the next several weeks.

I love Easter eggs. I love hiding them. I love decorating them. And I collect them. I even learned to make Ukrainian eggs—decorating via a wax resist method and using dye—although I’m not very good at it. When I was in the grocery store—just as COVID-19 fears ramped up—I couldn’t find any eggs to buy. My first thought concerned baking. My second thought, “What if we don’t have eggs available to decorate for Easter this year?” I realize that’s not very important compared to the far more serious issues we are facing. But sometimes it’s the little things, you know?

I decided to face my fear of no-Easter-eggs-this-year head on. How could we overcome? If ever there was a year to change things up, this was it.

I came up with a plan, but I wasn’t sure Lucy would go for it. Would she think she’s too old? Would she think it was dumb? To my surprise, she took my idea, expanded it, and now has a full-blown Easter Egg hunt—just for our family, considering social distancing and all—in the works.

First off, she pulled the bag of old plastic eggs from deep in the basement. Just for fun, she sorted them by color, tossing broken or incomplete eggs. Then she asked me to buy candy the next time I made a grocery store run.

But candy is just a small part of what’s going into the eggs. What really has her working hard are the encouraging Bible verses she’s including in every egg. I mentioned this idea to her, thinking this might be the sticking point. But whether it’s the state of the world right now, or maybe just the fact that she’s growing up, Lucy is spending hours looking up and typing out verses. (I decided not to tell her that she could just cut-and-paste them.) I even got a request from her to download a Bible app onto her phone. Umm…yes. Approved.

And so, as we look ahead to Easter in this uncertain time, let’s embrace new ways of doing things. Let’s expect big things of our children. Let’s tweak our traditions and revive old ones. God hasn’t changed. He is just as faithful today as He was before COVID-19 and as He will be tomorrow.

Thanks be to God.

God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” So we say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?”…Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. Hebrews 13:5-8 (NIV®)

Gretchen O’Donnell is an island girl living on the prairies of southwestern Minnesota with her husband, two youngest children, and two argumentative cats. She is very much looking forward to Easter. And even though it will not be the same celebrating the season at home and not with her church family, that won’t change the fact of what—and who—we are celebrating. Gretchen does freelance writing for her local newspaper and has a weekly faith-based newspaper column, The Disheveled Theologian. She loves telling stories of her ordinary life to help people see the theological truths in their own everyday lives.