Easter Delights!

We had a delightful Easter weekend!  We enjoyed time as a family, had festive fun with friends, and kept the real reason for the holiday at the forefront: celebrating Christ’s sacrificial death and glorious resurrection.

Saturday morning, Sienna and I finished up the Easter cutout cookies we’d started Friday afternoon.  After frosting several pink, blue, yellow, and green bunnies, butterflies, and geese, we were inspired to mix the pink and yellow frosting to make pale orange.  Then we frosted the carrots in a very pleasing and lifelike color scheme.

To continue our lesson in color mixing, we created lavendar frosting.  Our springtime, pastel colored cookies were complete! I LOVE making cutout cookies for holidays!  It’s a lot of work but so worth it.  The recipe for both the cookie and frosting were handed down from my mom and they’re amazing!  I’ll post the recipe as we get closer to Christmas.

This batch of cookies was our family’s contribution to an Easter Egg coloring party at our friends’ house that afternoon.  Several families got together to enjoy food, drinks, and each others’ company as the kids colored easter eggs outside at two big tables draped with plastic tablecloths. Such wise hosts!  Sienna patiently colored her eggs like a big six-year-old.  Whereas Mateo was burning through his supply of eggs – dropping one after the other into blue dye and then retrieving them within a minute.  I asked him to leave the eggs in a little longer so they’d become darker blue.  He replied, “They are dark blue!” as he lined his fifth, very pale blue egg in the drying carton.  Anyway, he had fun.

We came home with about 18 eggs and made egg salad for lunch after church on Sunday.  Yum!

A wonderful surprise to our Easter weekend was having one of Sienna’s school friends and her mom join us as church!  I’d gotten a text on Thursday asking if we were going to church Sunday since the mom wanted to take her daughter and they didn’t know where to go.  I’m constantly mentioning our church involvement to the moms I’m getting to know through Sienna’s school.  I wasn’t doing it as an evangelical effort, per se.  It’s just that we’re always planning or doing something related to our church and preschool.  It felt pretty awesome that this mom felt comfortable to ask about coming to our church!

After a backyard Easter egg hunt for the kids (seriously, what’s more fun than an Easter egg hunt?!) we read the kids a terrific book: The Very First Easter.  It’s written directly from the biblical narrative and provides an amazing amount of theological information in a very assessible way.  The author, Paul Maier is a Lutheran scholar; he was the speaker at our churches’ 100th anniversary gala and is pretty incredible.

The kids love this book!  Teo had me read it to him four times over within five nights awhile back.  It’s not a short book but the illustrations and content keep his attention.  There’s a picture of Jesus after he’s taken down from the cross.  There’s a small, red gash on his side that Mateo stops at each time – “What happened to Jesus there?” he asks.  I always reply, “The soldier stabbed him.” “Why?” he asks.  “Because they wanted to make sure he was dead.” “Oh.” he knowingly nods.

This book was just a joy to receive.  I’d gotten jaded over the years by “Easter” books for kids that were all about eggs, candy, and spring.  The Berenstein Bears are a favorite of mine, but the Easter book drove me nuts!  The “real meaning of Easter” is not about finding baby chick eggs in a nest.  If you’re interested in teaching your children the true story of Jesus’ ministry and the events of Holy Week, I really encourage you to check out this book.

As we drove home from church on Sunday, I reflected on the sense of rebirth that Easter, the resurrection, and springtime all collaborate to create on this day.  The new life in Christ that we enjoy because of his death and resurrection is fresh, bright, and pure.

Martin Luther said, “Our Lord has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in spring-time.”