How to Have a Real Food Easter

It is possible to have an Easter celebration that doesn’t include loads of sugary candy and chocolate. . . and still have your kids love it! Here’s a quick glimpse into our family’s Easter celebration this year.

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The first step to satisfying the Easter sweet tooth is to fill little bellies with nutritious and delicious real food. . . before egg and basket hunting. This year, our family began the day with church, followed by brunch, followed by an egg and basket hunt. This can help build anticipation and excitement for the day’s activities and also fuel little brains and bodies for the holiday festivities. Below is our Easter Brunch menu:

Meanwhile, we had our own nestling baby bunny napping through brunch preparations.

Baby bunny sat on my lap during brunch, and the big kids filled up on healthy real food, never losing excitement for the imminent Easter egg hunt.

Planning and cooking holiday-themed food is one of my great passions, but nothing beat this year’s Easter egg and basket hunt. This was the first year our almost 4-year-old daughter, Cecilia, could really understand and participate in the hunt, and both big kids ended up loving it.

Step 1: Fill Easter Eggs

How to avoid an Easter egg hunt that induces a sugar high, followed by a meltdown-inducing slump? Find a way to fill eggs with something real. This year, I made Vitamin C gummies using Easter candy molds.

These gummies were made with fresh-squeezed, organic orange juice, grass-fed beef gelatin, raw honey, sodium ascorbate powder (Vitamin C), and probiotic powder. You can find the recipe here.

Step 2: Hide Easter Eggs

The problem with real food is that it can melt, ferment, or rot much more quickly than highly processed food loaded with preservatives. Luckily, this year’s Easter morning was nice and cool, so we took the eggs from the fridge and hid them in the woods of our backyard before getting the kids dressed for church.

Waking up at 6 am and stumbling through the cold woods behind our home, coffee and colored eggs in hand, was much more fun than anticipated. Peter and I got really into it and took pictures of each hiding location to make sure no eggs remained undiscovered.

Step 3: Commence Hunt

We told our 7-year-old son to leave the easy-to-find eggs for Cecilia and scour the woods. Peter took Cecilia’s hand and helped her find the eggs in her path, open them, and eat the gummies inside. Meanwhile, I followed along with Baby Bunny in my favorite Boba wrap and camera in hand.

By the time we had pictures of Cecilia finding and eating her eggs and guiding her to find her basket, our son had found and eaten the gummies from at least half the eggs! It’s hard to feel too bad about it, though, knowing the Vitamin C and probiotic content of those gummies 🙂

Sourcing:

• Sodium Ascorbate (Vitamin C) powder: I use this every day, multiple times a day for adults and at least once a day for kids. I add 1/4 teaspoon to the kids’ water bottles.
• Probiotic powder: Each of our kids is currently on a different probiotic for different health concerns, but this is a solid, full-spectrum probiotic that I default to for both kids and adults.
• Grass-fed beef gelatin: Perfect for making gummies, jelly, or even buttercream. Check out Danielle Walker’s Celebrations for some excellent gelatin-based buttercream recipes.
• Silicone Easter candy molds: These are fun and easy for making Easter-themed gummies or homemade chocolate.

There are plenty of alternatives to filling Easter baskets with candy or junky toys; it just takes a bit of creativity. Most kids will be so delighted by the challenge of searching for eggs and baskets that they won’t stop to wonder where all the candy is.

Our kids had nothing edible in their baskets this year. Instead, they discovered baskets filled with educational toys, Easter crafts, and books. Here are some ideas to help get you started.

For the Little Ones (ages 0-5)

Consider 3-piece puzzles, wind-up bunnies or chicks, or Easter-themed bubbles. Finger-puppet, scratch-and-smell, crinkly, or lift-the-flap board books never fail to please the little ones.

Here are some of my favorites:

• Poppy and Sam and the Bunny by Sam Taplin
• You’re My Little Honey Bunny by Natalie Marshall
• The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown

For the Middle Ones (ages 5-10)

I love books, so books will always be my first recommendation for gifts. There’s a variety of fun Easter books for older kids. Our son’s favorite is How to Catch the Easter Bunny.

But Easter crafts are also a win-win for everyone. Arts and crafts do wonderful things for both adult and children’s brains, and hours of neurologically-healthy fun can be gained from simply placing craft kits in kids’ Easter baskets or Christmas stockings.

Our son loves making handmade cards and is always begging me for my expensive, scrapbooking cardstock. This Easter, we bought him his own collection of beautiful nautical-patterned cardstock for card-making. We also got him kits for making a foam-sticker Easter basket, paper-plate bunnies and chicks, and some beautiful ceramic eggs for painting. Easter pencils, erasers, and coloring books are other great options.

Some Other Ideas:

Easter-Themed Bubbles = Hours of Delight

Easter-Themed Chalk = Outdoor Time and Creativity

Easter-Themed Gel Window Clings = Kid-Friendly Holiday Decorating

Sourcing:

Far and above, Michaels crafts store can fill most of my holiday needs. They are the best place to find Easter basket and Christmas stocking stuffers, and they are great for sourcing inexpensive, holiday themed crafts and decorations. They usually release a holiday collection months before the holiday arrives, and if you can wait until a few weeks before the holiday, everything will typically go on sale. However, Amazon also has some great options for Easter baskets:

• Easter bubbles
• Easter chalk
• Easter window clings
• Easter erasers
• rainbow-colored pencils
• Easter coloring books
• scrapbooking paper

Michaels craft store is my go-to for holiday crafts and decorations, especially because I love to make floral arrangements to change out by the season. Our dining room is by far the most formal room in the house and the majority of adult/breakable decorations go in the dining room. This year, I made two window swags to match the spring floral vases I have decorating our console table.

I simply used green floral wire to tie the eucalyptus and floral egg components to the back of each nest. Since I already had the floral wire, each swag cost me about $10.50, or both for a total of $21.00.

I love holiday-themed gel window clings because they are a fun and easy way for children to participate in holiday decorating. Another easy way is to use everyday items you have around the house. We have these Melissa and Doug letter magnets that I keep on the side of my filing cabinet in our homeschooling classroom. Our son changes out the messages according to holidays and birthdays. . . that is, when he’s not busy educating me about how to spell diplodocus or parasaurolophus.

Books are also one of my everyday ways of decorating for holidays. I am an unrepentant bibliophile, and our daughter Cecilia loves being read to above all things, so I’ve grown a pretty significant holiday book collection over the years.

Favorite Easter Books:

1. The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by Du Bose Heyward. This is an absolutely beautiful story about a humble mother bunny who becomes 1 of the 5 Easter bunnies and undertakes the most difficult Easter egg delivery to a sick little boy who lives at the top of a snowy, distant mountain. She gets injured while trying to deliver this egg, and through her suffering, earns a pair of golden shoes that increase her strength and speed. It teaches hard work, humility, self-giving, and hope. I unfailingly cry when reading it out loud.
2. The Easter Egg by Jan Brett. It’s hard not to love anything by Jan Brett. She’s the most beautiful children’s illustrator I have come across. The Easter Egg is her story of a little bunny who dreams of winning the Easter Bunny’s contest of who can create the most beautiful egg. He gains ideas from the older, more talented bunnies around him, but ends up finding a fallen and abandoned robin’s egg nest and sits on the egg in place of the fallen mother until the baby bird hatches. He ends up winning the Easter Bunny’s contest for the most beautiful egg. It also teaches humility, self-giving, and hope, with an emphasis on patience.
3. The Bunny Who Found Easter by Charlottle Zolotow. This story is a little bit like the Easter version of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. It’s a story about a bunny who searches for the meaning of Easter and finds it eventually by falling in love and having copious amounts of baby bunnies with his wife. It teaches children to look beyond the commercialism and greed of the holiday to the meaning of spring as a time of rebirth and renewal.

It can be tough to find kid-friendly religious books for Easter, mostly because you cannot have Resurrection without crucifixion. Here are some of the religious Easter books I’ve found over the years.

Religious Easter Books:

1. God Gave Us Easter by Lisa Tawn Bergren is a little-one-friendly version of the Easter story.
2. The Donkey That No One Could Ride by Anthony DeStefano is my favorite religious Easter book. It tells the Easter story from the perspective of the donkey that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.
3. The Easter Story by Carol Heyer is another kid-friendly version of the Easter story, more suited to kids ages 5-9.
4. The Very First Easter by Paul Maier is a beautifully illustrated and detailed version of the Easter story that includes bible quotes. However, it has a lot of text and puts down the concept of the Easter bunny who delivers eggs and baskets, so it’s better suited for older kids and teenagers.
5. The Legends of Easter Treasury by Dandi Daley Mackall is a beautiful compilation of 3 tales exploring the symbols of the egg, the robin, and the sand dollar and their relationship with the Easter story.

Easter is a wonderful time to get kids interested in all things egg, nest, and gardening. Here are some of my favorite books to educate kids about baby plants and animals.

Egg, Nest, and Gardening Books

1. An Egg is Quiet, A Nest is Noisy, and A Seed is Sleepy by Diana Hutts Aston. This series is replete with absolutely gorgeous illustrations of real species. They show the scope and variety of the natural world, increasing wonder and curiosity in kids. They also do a great job of having simpler, shorter text summarizing each page for younger kids, and including deeper detail about each illustration for the older kids who have longer attention spans. This series also includes A Butterfly is Patient, A Rock is Lively, and A Beetle is Shy.
2. Whose Egg and Whose Nest by Guy Troughton. These beautiful lift-the-flap books have kids guessing who is in the eggs and nests. These are some of our son’s favorite books to read aloud to Cecilia. (Note on sourcing: I bought these books years ago, and it seems hard to find Whose Egg online for under $50. Try keeping an eye out a thrift stores or used book shops for this one.)
3. My Busy Green Garden by Terry Pierce. This book is also beautifully illustrated and builds a poem through repetition, adding on a line each page–similar to The Napping House by Audrey Wood. It tells the story of a butterfly emerging from its cocoon in the midst of other garden creatures, encouraging children to listen and watch the small things in the natural world.
4. We Are The Gardeners by Joanna Gaines. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love Chip and Joanna Gaines and their show Fixer Upper. This book is the story of Chip and Joanna teaching their kids how to garden and the value of hard work and not giving up.
5. Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt by Kate Messner. This book does a wonderful job of emphasizing the importance of the world underneath the soil and its relationship with what appears on the earth’s surface. It’s part of a bigger series by Kate Messner including Over and Under the Pond, Over and Under the Snow, Over and Under the Rain Forest, and Over and Under the Canyon.

Our daughter, Cecilia, was born with Senior-Loken Syndrome, a one-in-a-million worldwide genetic disorder. She is now almost 4 years old, and we do everything we can to help her see the world through her fingers, mouth, and ears. Here are some things we did this year to help Cecilia experience Easter.

Braille and Tactile Easter Basket

I ordered a personalized Easter basket liner from a shop on Etsy called Porter Lane Home. The shop owner was kind enough to add braille dots spelling Cecilia’s name to the top of her basket liners and tactile elements like glitter gold paint to highlight the flowers. I also ordered a carrot tag from an Etsy shop called Ludovikoboxes for her birthday so that she could feel the letters of her nickname.

Beeping and “Shaky” Eggs

Two years ago, Cecilia’s visual therapist was able to source three beeping eggs from The Rachel Project so that Cece could attempt to find Easter eggs by sound. This year, she learned how to turn her beeping eggs on and off by herself. I also filled a set of regular eggs with everyday items that make fun noises, then taped them shut. She calls them her “shaky” eggs, and she holds them to her ears, shakes them, and giggles at the different sounds. Here are some things I used:

• pennies
• paper clips
• dice
• rice
• sand
• peppercorns
• dried beans

Flag Easter Egg Hunt

This year, for the big Easter egg hunt with extended family and cousins, Cecilia’s grandparents set out red flags over brightly colored eggs for Cecilia. All her aunts and uncles told their kids to leave the eggs under the flags for Cece to find, and Peter helped her walk around to find and feel each flag, then discover the egg at the base of the flag. She was absolutely delighted to participate in the Easter egg hunt with all her cousins.

Sensory Easter Books

Since Cecilia’s diagnosis, I have been collecting interactive and sensory books that include touch-and-feel, lift-the-flap, scratch-and-smell, finger puppets, crinkly, sound, music, and kinetic elements. Usborne Books & More has a wonderful variety of interactive and sound books, and we’ve collected many of their books over the past few years. Here are some of my favorite sensory Easter books:

1. Peter Rabbit Follows His Nose (scratch-and-sniff)
2. Poppy and Sam and the Bunny (finger puppet)
3. Easter Bunny (touch-and-feel)
4. Busy Bug Book (pullback bug that rides on tracks)
5. The Very Hungry Caterpillar Garden Picnic (scratch-and-sniff)
6. The Tiny Seed (crinkly book)

Color Education

Like most visually impaired children, Cecilia has some vision. Exactly how much has been a mystery to us and ophthalmologists alike. The only one who truly knows what she can see is Cecilia herself, and now that she’s growing more verbal, we are becoming surprised and delighted by the visual elements in her environment that she occasionally comments on.

We’ve had reason for some time to believe that Cecilia can see color. So, for Easter this year, I wanted to give her items in her basket that can assist in color education. Here are some of the things I chose:

1. Quiet Bunny’s Many Colors by Lisa McCue. The Quiet Bunny series has beautiful illustrations and are great books to read aloud to kids with visual impairment because they include many descriptions of sounds. Cecilia loves them. Quiet Bunny’s Many Colors has fewer sound elements and instead focuses on the colors of springtime. It is a visually beautiful book and celebrates how all colors come together to form beauty.
2. The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s Easter Colors by Eric Carle. This simple board book pairs colors with Easter elements like chicks and lambs. It’s a great option to read with Cecilia and then have her read back to herself from memory.
3. The Golden Egg by AJ Wood is a beautiful lift-the-flap book about a little duck that is searching for the perfect egg. He finds beautiful eggs of all different colors before finding a rainbow-colored chocolate egg to give to his true love.
4. Birds in a Nest Sorting Set is a tactile color education tool where the simple task for the child is to pair each set of mama bird and baby birds in their color-appropriate nest.

Cecilia’s retinal condition causes gradual degeneration over a long period of time. My hope is that we can help to preserve as much of her vision for as long as possible so that she can experience and later remember visual elements like color. In the meantime, we simply hope to give her colorful and light-filled experiences learning about the world around her with the people she loves.

Like Christmas, we can all get lost in the purchasing frenzy and sugar overdose of Easter, but ultimately, it is a time to celebrate the days growing longer, the sun coming back to the earth, and, for those of faith, the Son saving the earth. It’s a time to remember that the bare branches and long dark of winter are not the end of the story, but that plants, animals, and humans are constantly engaged in a cycle of death, rebirth, and renewal. It is a time to celebrate beginnings, sunlight, growing things, and Resurrection. From my house to yours, I wish you Easter blessings, sunny days, and great joy!

How does your family celebrate Easter? Leave a comment and share your family’s traditions below!