Easter Memories & Traditions

For as long as I can remember, Easter has been my favorite holiday. Which I now see is kind of ironic, since spring is my least-favorite season. But Easter is definitely the best part of spring!
Things were different as a child than they are now, but through all the years and traditions and things, I’ve always loved this holiday.
Probably my favorite thing is the church service. Easter Sunday is my favorite Sunday of the whole year! We have all the instruments and the choir and you can FEEL the joy in the sanctuary. Palm Sunday is my second-favorite Sunday because it is so similar to Easter.
I thought it would be fun to share some of my favorite traditions around Easter. Some are from my childhood and we don’t do them anymore, but I have very fond memories of them!

Dyeing Easter Eggs

This was always so much fun! My Grammy had us come over and we each got a dozen hard boiled eggs to dye however we wanted. For many years we wrote the name of a family member on each egg. Sometimes we did multi-colored eggs, you could get a different color based on how long you left it in the solution, and near the end, we would mix colors to get new colors! By the time I was old enough that it wasn’t quite so much of a novelty anymore, my cousins were doing it and I loved helping them 😊

“Decorating” the church for Good Friday

My Grammy is one of the ladies who sets up the altar for Maundy Thursday service and then afterwards, we help her clean everything up and change the altar and everything to Good Friday. It’s a special tradition and one that I always look forward to.

Easter bags from Grammy

As you can see, a lot of my Easter memories revolve around my Grammy :) When we were little, we had a family friend who gave us all Easter baskets with all the candy and stuff. So instead of giving us another basket of candy, she gave us little brown lunch sacks with fun treats in them! Still things we didn’t usually get but not just candy. I remember those pretzels or breadsticks with cheese, Rice Krispy treats, and Pop Tarts were some of the things she did over the years. (She did a similar thing for Halloween).
Easter cookies

My Oma lived next door to me growing up and I did a lot of baking with her. I don’t recall how old I as when we started doing Easter cookies. We’d make sour cream cookies (they are SO SOFT!) and then make frosting and do all kinds of colors to decorate our eggs and butterflies and other spring/Easter shaped cookies. It was a lot of work so I stopped doing it when I got older and didn’t have as much time. This year I made a Lofthouse-style cookie with just plain white frosting, though I did make half lemon flavored!
Resurrection Eggs

This is a tool to teach kids about the Easter narrative. It has twelve colored plastic eggs and each one has something to symbolize a part of the account. For example, there is a donkey, coins, a cup, a rock, a crown of thorns… that kind of thing. It’s so fun to see little kids remembering and knowing more and more each year and also hearing what they say about each item. One year a cousin called the crown of thorns a “crown of pokes”. He wasn’t wrong 😂

Easter Breakfast

Our youth group does an Easter breakfast as a fundraiser each year and it’s delicious! It was even fun to help make and serve when I was the right ages for that. And we get to sit and eat as a family with my aunt and uncle and cousins as well so that makes it special.



When I think about Easter, I think about people. Going to church with my whole family, seeing people I haven’t seen in a long time, eating together at Easter Breakfast, the things we do together to prepare… it’s so joyous. And that is the theme of Easter - joy. Because of Easter we can be joyful and have hope, even in the darkest of times. Because of Easter we know that one day, all will be made right. There will be no more pain or suffering or illness or anything broken.


I would love to hear what memories or traditions you have surrounding Easter!