Easter Activities - adding new meaning

This year I decdied that I wanted to place more emphasis on Easter than I have in past years. Curious George is almost 3 and so I felt he could take in more information about the incredible gift we were given by God at Easter. There is a lot of hype around Christmas whereas Easter often seems to decend on me on Good Friday and then the season last only three days. Without Jesus' death on the cross we as Christrians would have nothing. When you think about it that way it really is the most important 'holiday' in the Christian calendar. I also read a great article by Mark Driscoll called What we tell our kids about the Easter Bunny, which inspired me.

With all this in mind I decided to start a Pinterest board and collect some ideas to make Easter a little more special for my son than just the loads of chocolate on Easter Sunday. There are some really amazing ideas out there and here are the ones I chose to do with my family during Holy Week. As Curious George was on holiday I decided to try and do one special activity a day.

Toddler Resurecttion Eggs

I made a toddler version of Resurrection Eggs which I adapted slightly from an idea I found here on the Motherhood on a Dime blog.We don't have an abundance of plastic eggs in South Africa but I found clear plastic eggs at Westpack and then Modge Podged serviette paper onto them. I used an clear egg box from those white eggs you get at Easter. I also printed the poem and stuck it to the inside of the lid. I added a cross necklace instead of a paper cross because CG loves to wear things and I added a hollow chocolate egg for Easter Sunday because I wanted to talk to him about why we have hollow Easter eggs.

Each night at dinner we opened an egg and read the corresponding line of the poem then we talked a bit about it. It really helped him to grasp some of the concepts of God's love for us.

Easter Garden

We made an Easter garden which is a tradition in my family. This year I decided to make it at the beginning of the week, with CG's help, so that we could enjoy it all week. An Easter Garden is a tableau of the Tomb and the hill with the three crosses. This year we rolled the boulder over the entrance to the tomb on Good Friday and opened it on Easter Sunday to reveal the grave was empty and only the grave clothes (a ribbon) remained.

Easter Bunny Cupcakes

As I am not against the fun commercial side of Easter we made Easter bunny cupcakes one day.

Easter Movie

On Good Friday we went to church and then came home and watched the Easter movie we had bought for CG. There were not a lot of choices for Easter movies in South Africa but we chose the Lion of Judah. Honestly the animation is really bad and the story is not fantastic either but it seemed to get the point across to CG so that's all that matters.

Easter Hats

I had asked all our family to wear an Easter hat for Sunday lunch so on Saturday we made hats. Here are ours and here are the ones the grandparents came up with.

Resurrection Rolls

After lunch on Sunday we made Resurrection Rolls. I used the recipe I found here. As we don't have Pillsbury Crescent dough I used plain old frozen short crust pastry. They didn't taste wonderful because the pastry was hard but they amazed the children and got the point across. In fact when CG was asked where the Jesus marshmallow had gone he said "he is risen deed" (he is risen indeed), which is the response to our Easter Sunday greeting - The Lord is Risen, He is Risen Indeed.

There are so many lovely photos of us making these that I think I will put them in a separate post.

All in all we had a wonderfully meaningful Holy week and I really feel that my little one had a better understanding of the awesome gift that we were given.