I wanted to share some of the ways we celebrated last weekend for Easter.  As a Christian, it is the MOST important holiday because without the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, He would just be a crazy man who happened to do nice things.  So, wanting my girls to be REALLY excited about life because of Jesus and Easter, I took some ideas I had seen on Pinterest for candy bags and made them with scripture.  I did this all the night before, because I am a deadline gal– or because that is when I finally DO something with the creative juices.  I had picked up M&M’s, peeps, and jelly beans and so that is what I worked with.  I added the bow to the M&Ms by a simple hole punch.  I used glassine bags I bought off of Amazon for a different project, white cardstock I had picked up from Big Lots, and my printer which thankfully didn’t run out of ink.  (If there is a lot of interest for these, I can post my templates.)

Here they are closer up…

And the last one.  My oldest now jokes that she memorized this verse as “peeps”.  And then you’ll see my empty tomb cake…

So the tomb cake was an idea I saw online and then when my mom asked me to do dessert for Easter dinner and that she’d like to pick up some “just picked” strawberries (bonus of living 20 minutes from Oxnard– strawberry capital of the U.S.!.  I made my first gluten free pound cake following this recipe here with the Bob Red Mill baking flour.  I baked it that afternoon and when we went to my parent’s house I didn’t come prepared with adornments, so I used what my mom had:

•  A cookie sheet to put it on
• Green construction paper for the ground, black for behind the tomb
• Toothpicks for the sign posts, angel, and guard, as well as the guard’s sword
• Mini marshmallows for the angel’s body and for the linen clothes left behind; also for the guard’s face
• Jelly bean(s) cut for the shining angel, and then the uniform/armor for the guard.  I also cut some for flowers on a nearby “rock”.
• Strawberries for “boulders”
• Powdered sugar (mixed with a tablespoon of water) drizzled on the cake for “artistry.”
• Pen to draw faces, and make a sign.

This was fun to make and a great way to reinforce the story of the resurrection for my children too.  And for me!  Plus the cake was so good (even better a few days later) and I was glad that when I was talking on the phone to my brother and baking it I didn’t add the wrong amount of flour.  (I lost track, had to empty what was left in the bag and do some math to figure it out.)  Also, the fresh strawberries, whipped cream, and ice cream it was served with made for a delicious and gluten free Easter dessert.  Obviously, you could do this with gluten too.

While at my parent’s for dinner we also had our annual Easter egg hunt, which just seems to be more enjoyable each year.  The girls still had their “Easter dresses” on although little M. was already barefoot at this point, but K. loves her “fancy” shoes that have a little heel to them.

 

That is their second hunt of the day.  The first is a scavenger Easter egg hunt they do in the morning to find their baskets.  I do this every year for them.  Before K. could read I would do pictures.  Each egg contains a clue that leads to a location where they have to find another egg, with the next clue, and so on until the last egg and clue leads to their basket.  You have to put the eggs in places that will rest well overnight and not be discovered before the egg-scavengar hunt begins.  I did this the night before as well, and had enough creative juices left over to make it all rhyme, and enough cardstock scraps leftover to write the clues on them.  (The rhymes aren’t Pulitzer winners, but they kept it fun.)  I also used a Sharpie to number the eggs so I knew where they were going when I went to distribute them.  It too was a lot of fun!  I filled their baskets with their special candy packs (as seen above) and then I had a pair of dress up butterfly wings for each of them (forgot to stick them in their baskets LAST year), egg chalk and bubbles from the dollar store, and a book for each of them.  Their baskets were from the dollar section at Target and will work as a summer purse/tote bag for them.  Breakfast was a gluten free frittata that I can’t write or link a recipe for because I improvised as I went along, and then some gluten free organic blueberry muffins and turkey bacon (Trader Joe’s.)  This year we were blessed to enjoy the day like we did, and I was very thankful.

And as fun as this all was, the best part was probably leading up to Sunday morning.  We have a set of Resurrection Eggs and I read them with the girls.  Then K. read it to M– and my heart overflowed, and I told K. what an amazing sister she is.  And not long after M. told it to her dolls–and I smiled and treasured her story, silently, so she wouldn’t know I heard her, until later when I told her how proud of her I was.  Yes, Easter, the resurrection is a story that never gets old and is always worth telling.