Easter’s rapidly approaching and you’ve bought the usual Easter eggs for the kids but you want to make more of it than that for them so you’re looking for ideas. Obviously to Christians Easter means far more than just Easter eggs anyway but to others too it goes way beyond chocolate eggs. The secular side of Easter is all about celebrating new life in Spring when the cold, dead hand of Winter is lifted from the countryside and everything bursts into life.

That’s how it’s supposed to be, although our climate doesn’t always seem to be aware of that! Easter eggs are the best known symbol of that new life, whether hard boiled or chocolate. Neither are likely to hatch anything but that doesn’t matter. It’s the symbolism that counts.

Easter’s also a holiday of course and the kids are at home expecting to be entertained. You’ve got chocolate eggs for them but what else can you do.? Have a look at what’s going on around the area you live in and you’ll find that many of the local attractions put on Easter Egg Hunts for children to take part in. The younger kids especially can get a lot of fun out of an egg hunt.

If you’re not familiar with the idea don’t worry, its very simple. The organisers hide Easter eggs in various places around a marked off area. The kids know the chocolate eggs are concealed in that area somewhere and it’s finders keepers! You pay an entry fee, which is usually for some local charity, and leave the kids to it. It can keep them occupied for quite some time.

Of course kids’ games involving hunting for sweets and the like are nothing new and not only associated with Easter. If you’re still looking for Easter ideas you could do worse than organise an Easter party for your kids so they can invite all their friends.

If the weather’s fine you’ll want to organise games for them out of doors. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t set up an Easter egg hunt in your garden if it’s big enough. You can buy all the accessories such as ribbons for marking out and banners etc, from a party supplies shop.

If you want to do something a bit different to chocolate eggs you can buy hollow decorated cardboard eggs that you can fill up with a variety of sweets. That’s a very old idea from long before chocolate Easter eggs were first made and it’s still with us to this day.

It’s not altogether surprising that eggs dominate the Easter celebrations to the extent they do. Eggs were involved in the spring festival celebrations long before Christianity came along. In those days the rites were dedicated to the Anglo Saxon Goddess of Spring, Eostre, which eventually became, “Easter” so your chocolate egg comes with a long pedigree!

It doesn’t have to be eggs that you hide at all actually. You can remain true to the traditions of Easter without having eggs, especially if you want to stick with chocolate! Chicks, and bunnies are associated with Spring and therefore with Easter. In Germany and the USA children are told the Easter Bunny will visit them in the night and leave them presents. Easter chocolate comes shaped as bunnies and chicks as well as eggs.

All these suggestions still seem to involve Easter eggs though don’t they? Or at any rate Easter chocolate in some form or other. So what can you do with the kids that doesn’t? After all there may be a limit to the amount of chocolate you want them to eat.

Easter’s a perfect time to take the kids to one of the many “Adventure Farms,” that are dotted about the countryside, usually not far out of town. There they can see lambs being bottle fed and other baby animals when you take them along in the Spring. Of course Easter is a moveable feast and what the kids get to see at these farms will vary according to when Easter falls.

That’s the problem with finding fun things for the kids to do at Easter. In a year when Easter is very early Winter’s barely over and Spring has hardly started so the weather may not favour outdoor activities. When it comes at it’s latest it’s nearly Summer so with any luck the sun will shine on all the Easter fairs and fetes and the Easter Egg Hunts.

If it’s a wet Easter, why not set the kids to finding out what sort of things people used to do at this time? Then let them have a go themselves. They’ll have a lot of fun and learn something at the same time. You might learn something too if you do it with them!

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