Easter 🐣 How we celebrated (in 2016)

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Today is Easter, and we have so much planed! From meeting Mr. Bunny at the Egg Hunt, to watching our favorite HOP movie (buy here), to Easter-themed writing, counting and egg decorating!

The tracing of letters is from our Easter 2015 Activities pack. I encourage Julia to write something every day, even if it is a line or two, or a simple tracing like here. (Next year, I hope Adrian will be tracing those letters.)

It is time to decorate the eggs. We use purple onion's dry/outer skin, which we boil for about five minutes. The water will turn dark purple/brown.
We would then, make a design on an egg with parsley or dill by wrapping the herb around the egg, and either spooling the thread around it, or placing an egg in a pantyhose or a mesh bag like here (from a garlic), and boiling it in that purple/brown onion skin's water.

Once the eggs are fully cooked, discard the mesh, an a design will emerge - almost like with Sun Art, but here, we are using water heat source instead of a sun.

The Egg, an ancient symbol of new life, has been associated with pagan festivals celebrating spring. Decorating eggs for Easter is a tradition that dates back to at least the 13th century. Eggs were formerly a forbidden food during the Lenten season, so people would paint and decorate them to mark the end of the period of fasting, and then eat them on Easter as a celebration.

And, in the spirit of a new life, what about watering our "Garden in the planters"?

Our strawberries are growing!

We also read Easter: Holidays Around the World (buy here), which is a good series to introduce the holiday.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit book (buy here) has very simple text and might be engaging even for a one year old. Rabbits are known to be prolific procreators, so, since ancient times, rabbits have been a symbol of fertility and new life. According to some sources, the Easter bunny first arrived in America in the 1700s with German immigrants, whose children would make nests for the Hare (called “Osterhase” or “Oschter Haws") to lay its colored eggs. With time, the custom spread across the U.S., and the fabled rabbit’s Easter morning deliveries would also include chocolate, while decorated baskets replaced the nests. Children would often leave out carrots for the bunny in case he got hungry from all his hopping.