How We Celebrate Easter

Easter is my FAVORITE holiday (along with the 4th of July).

Unfortunately, Easter is horribly under-celebrated by the vast majority of Christian folk. Most of us agree that Christ's death & resurrection is the reason why Jesus came to earth in the first place, so it baffles me that people don't go more crazy for Easter than they do for Christmas, or at least give the two holidays equal importance.

Even among members in our church, I feel that the holiday does not get the attention it deserves. So I am trying to start a few special traditions that will help our future children understand that Easter marks the time when our Savior accomplished His ultimate mission on the earth: to save us from physical and spiritual death, and is therefore the MOST important Christian holiday ever.

Here's what I've come up with so far.

How the JermaLynn Zavorals will celebrate Easter:

• Play lots of Easter hymns and songs on the piano/stereo several weeks leading up to Easter. Isn't it wierd that we start playing Christmas hymns in our home in October, but we often wait until Easter Sunday to play Easter music? No more in our house! I was able to play the piano a lot this Easter season, and it changed everything!
• On Good Friday, eat hot cross buns for breakfast. These are sweet rolls with fruit and nuts inside and frosting or extra dough on the top in the shape of a cross. The rolls have been cooked for hundreds of years in Europe on Good Friday. And yes, the song "Hot Cross Buns" was a real song that children in England sang as they sold the buns on the morning of Good Friday. You could buy one large one for a penny, or two smaller ones for a penny. I found some hot cross buns at health foods store and ate 2 dozen of them throughout the week!
• On Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, find time to enjoy nature with the family- maybe a nature walk, a walk on the beach, a picnic in the park, whatever. This year, we enjoyed the gardens at the Getty Museum on Palm Sunday. And I taught my primary class (aka Sunday school) outside on Easter Sunday so that we could enjoy the spring nature while we talked about the resurrection.
• Read the Easter story from both the Bible and Book of Mormon throughout the week leading up to Easter. I spent 2 weeks teaching my primary class about the Easter story in the Book of Mormon. These 7 & 8 year olds know their gospel doctrine really well, but when it came to telling them this story, they were clueless! We can't forget to tell our children about the miracles that took place in the Americas after Christ was resurrected.
• Have a party on Easter Eve. We have parties on Christmas Eve, so why not Easter Eve? We had an Easter Eve party with two other couples. Dinner included Hormel ham and deviled eggs. We played games, colored hard-boiled eggs, had a competition with making rice-crispie sculptures, and ate cake. YUM! Parties in the future can also include singing Easter songs.The competition was to create easter eggs out of rice-crispie treats. Jeremy made scrambeled, Sunny-side up, and deviled eggs, along with an omelette, as seen below.
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• Have a big dinner on Easter Day. From now on, our main dish will be Fish and Honeycomb, the food that Christ ate when he was resurrected. (Salmon with a honey glaze will be perfect! We could also have unleavened bread and salad with yummy olives). I thought of this idea too late, so we didn't actually do it this year. But I think it's a perfect way to remember Christ. It was so important that He ate food with his apostles after he was resurrected. This proved to everyone that Jesus was indeed alive again, his spirit reunited with his flesh. If He was just a spirit, he wouldn't have been able to eat.
• Also on the Easter Day feast, we will include resurrection rolls. These are your typical Pillsbury rolls, but when they are cut open, they have an empty hole in the center, like the tomb. The way you make them is by rolling the dough around a marshmallow! I'm told the marshmallow melts away in the oven.
• Keep the Easter Bunny and everything that goes with him to a minimum. I know this is a very controversial issue with some of our extended family, but to me, it makes no sense to spend time and energy on making my children believe in something that isn't real. As one of my primary students wisely said at church last week, "At our house, we don't celebrate the Easter bunny because we like to focus on the Savior. But we still eat lots of candy!!"