Easter Week

We celebrate Easter in a big way in our family! It is important to me that my kids get a strong understanding of what we are really celebrating at Easter and who the focus of this day should be, so we take the whole week to build up for the blessed Easter day.

We start a week before Easter on Palm Sunday. The cousins come over and we reenact the Savior's triumphal entry into Jerusalem by acting it out.

The apostles come to take the donkey because the Lord has need of it.

Riding into Jerusalem. We lay our "cloaks" on the ground under him, and wave palm fronds, and shout "Hosanna!" Then we sing a Hosanna primary song.

It is east to do, but the kids love it!

Then for the rest of the week, every night, we get together for a few minutes and read in the New Testament about some of the things that Christ did during his last week. We find pictures of the events of his last week and tape them up in the family room as the week progresses. We learn a new Easter hymn, and practice it all week.

There are a few books that I rely on for ideas and to get a breakdown of just what Christ did on his last week: A Christ-Centered Easter by Janet and Joe Hales and God So Loved the World by Eric Huntsman. I have been using the first one for years and it is wonderful because it is filled with recipes, activity ideas and stories, as well as a side-by-side chronological comparisons of the last week of Christ's life in the 4 gospels. I just got the second book this year and it is a lot more scholarly with more in-depth look into the last week of Christ's life, Crucifixion and Resurrection.

Thursday night we always have a special evening - a passover dinner, like the one Christ ate at the Last Supper. We discuss what Christ did that night of all nights when he feasted with his apostles in the upper room, washed their feet, and administered the first sacrament to them and them went to the garden of Gethsemane where he performed much of the work of the miraculous atonement and suffered for our sins before he was betrayed and drug off by Roman soldiers.

But then we have our own little version of a Jewish Passover Seder ceremony and discuss each food and action and how each is Symbolic of Jesus Christ.

We have been doing this for several years now and I learn more, it seems, each year, and the kids understand and participate more each year. It is really wonderful!

If you are interested, I have done a detailed post about much of the symbolism and what we do here.

Another part of out Easter week that my kids love are the making of the Easter Story cookies that we make together on Saturday night, but don't eat until Easter morning. There are scriptures to read and discuss with each ingredient. Another easy and meaningful activity. Click here for the recipe.

But I think for me, my very favorite part of our Easter Week is what we do very, very early Easter morning.

I wake the kids up while it is still dark, and we wrap ourselves in blankets, go out into the backyard, climb up on top of the play structure, and huddle together as we read from then gospels of that blessed Easter morning and the empty tomb, and then sing "He is Risen" and other Easter hymns as the sun rises.

It is perfect!

(My kids only complained the first time we did it. Now they look forward to it.)

Then we come inside and enjoy our Easter Story Cookies, and a yummy breakfast of a breakfast casserole (recipes here) and sticky pull-apart bake (recipe here) that have been baking while were were outside. A feast for a joyous celebration of what had happened that glorious morning!

The rest of our Easter Sunday is pretty typical - church, Easter baskets, egg dying, an egg hunt, and a yummy Easter dinner of course, but I will save all that for another post.

But the things that we do in the week preceding and the morning of Easter Sunday really lay a foundation, I believe for all of those other things.

I love doing it and my children enjoy all of our Easter traditions. Most of the activities we do are very easy to put together, and even those things that take more work are really worth it! You must know that we don't do all of it every year, and some nights we may miss our little readings because life gets crazy, but we do our best. What we do get in always points us toward our Savior, and the importance of this most sacred and wonderful Easter holiday.

And it is way less work, and I think, more important in some ways, than Christmas is.

Without Easter there would be no Christmas, you know.