Mike, Christi, and the kids came down from Virginia to join us for baskets and egg hunts. Even though Kyler is seven and Jaden is nearly ten, the Easter Bunny still believes in them ;) and hid their baskets in my backyard.

   
The Christian aspects of Easter are not the parts I chose to celebrate.  (I’d say the way Jesus lived is more important than the way he died.)  And I’m way too old to care about the candy.

But I love the Basket, the Bunny, and the Eggs. I love the early morning, the sunrise and birdsong, the hiding, the finding. I’d be perfectly happy to celebrate Easter on the equinox, actually… for me, this is a holiday about Spring:  about getting up early to see the world new, and finding all its tiny hidden treasures.

  

My family is seriously into egg-decorating. My mother does those amazing Ukrainian eggs, with the intricate geometric designs. I use the melted beeswax and tiny tools to draw non-traditional (and not so geometric) little landscapes and patterns on the egg. I love to dye brown eggs (instead of white ones); it gives the eggs vivid but still “natural” tones of glowing gold and red, and subtle, easy-to-hide-outdoors greens and blues. Sometimes we wrap the eggs in leaves and flowers, tie them with bits of nylon stocking, and dye them to leave a floral silhouette. This year we learned a whole new trick – I can’t believe we’d never done this before… if you have an old silk tie or blouse (it has to be real silk!) you can wrap the egg in scraps of the patterned fabric and soak them in hot water with vinegar. The pattern transfers from the silk to the egg – stripes, dots, tiny paisley…

We always have an Egg Hunt in properly competitive style. :)

This year, since the numbers worked out well, we played “boys vs girls.” The ladies hid eggs in the backyard while the gentlemen hid eggs in the front yard, and then we traded places to hunt for each others’ eggs, trying to find more eggs, faster, than the other “team.”