The April 20 Easter date this year is unusually late. Although Easter was originally created as a Christian holiday to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, it has evolved into a holiday filled with chocolate and Easter- egg hunts. Students explain their Easter Sunday traditions.
“My family and I play a game when we get together for Easter. In the game, each person gets a hard-boiled egg that they get to decorate any way they want to. Once we decorate the eggs, we play a game called egg pacqueing. Each person holds their hard-boiled egg and taps the ends of their egg with another person’s egg. You keep tapping the ends of your egg with other people’s eggs until there is only one person with both ends of their egg intact. Essentially, the goal is to crack somebody else’s egg with your own egg without breaking your own.” —Clare Fina, junior
“My father used to have a scavenger-hunt type event where he would put small pieces of paper that had instructions on them around—kind of like what people do with eggs, but with paper. We would follow the instructions on the paper to get to the next clue, and this would continue until we got to the end of the hunt, where the prizes would be.”—Jane Batarseh, high-school Latin teacher
“When I was younger, my family used to do the traditional Easter things, like decorating eggs and then hiding and finding them around my house and yard. But ever since I started middle school, my family and I just go to a block party in my neighborhood, where we eat a large pancake breakfast. I can’t believe that people my age are still doing Easter egg hunts, but with money instead of candy!”—Adam Ketchum, sophomore
“My cousins and I all go on a big Easter egg hunt. After we collect the eggs, we separate them into two different piles: eggs with candy in them, and eggs with money in them. We then count all of the candy, and kind of like how we do on Halloween, trade all of the candy we don’t like. After that we count our money, and whoever has the most wins. The prize is, obviously, getting more money than everybody else, but really you win bragging rights. Usually there are only quarters and dimes in the Easter eggs, but occasionally there are a few eggs with $5. The most I have ever gotten was around $10, so my younger cousins usually end up winning.”—Sydney Michel, sophomore
“Last year I went on the school trip to Italy, so I wasn’t home during Easter. But my parents told me that I was going on the trip by doing something in the Easter spirit. They hid small pieces of paper in several plastic eggs around our house. Once I gathered all of the pieces of paper, I had to put them all together to discover what the surprise was: a map of Italy. It was so cool!”—Lauren Larrabee, junior
“On Easter Sunday, my sister (eighth grader Lily Brown) and I would dress up in cute little dresses in the morning, and then we would go on Easter-egg hunts in our backyard. Not surprisingly, we don’t do that anymore, but now we have a nice breakfast and do regular things during the day. My entire family dresses up at night, and we have a large dinner with pork tenderloin. And to end the evening, we eat Peeps and robin eggs for dessert.”—Emma Brown, sophomore
“Since I grew up in China, I never really experienced Easter until I moved to America. As far as I know, there aren’t any holidays in the Chinese culture that are similar to Easter, so I found Easter to be very exciting and colorful.”—Daniel Kong, senior
