Simple Easter Traditions: 7 Ideas for Families

Father and Daughters doing bedtime Bible Storybook Reading

Easter Traditions for families often involve candy, chocolate bunnies, and hunting for easter eggs. While these Easter traditions are fun, we want to include family traditions that intentionally point to the religious and historical significance behind Easter.

This year, we are embracing seven practices to introduce and remind our kids why celebrating Easter is so significant.

We have tried to cultivate an intentional, proactive approach to Advent and Christmas as a family over the last few years. We’ve incorporated some Advent and Christmas Traditions as well as picking and choosing from a variety of Character-Building Activities to do during the Christmas Season.

And we have tried to increase our intentionality leading up to Easter as well. As a Christian family, we want our children to be well-versed in understanding the significance of Easter within our faith tradition first, before they grasp much of the commercialism around the holiday.

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What Easter Traditions Were Like Growing Up:

Growing up in evangelical American Christianity, I loved Easter. I enjoyed singing Easter songs at church, and I loved having a hearty breakfast with our church family on Easter morning. I also enjoyed having a delicious lunch at my Grandma’s house after church, and taking turns hiding eggs with my siblings.

But a big part of my love of Easter also had to do with the fact that my Mom did an amazing job of filling up Easter Baskets to wake up to on Easter morning.

My Dad’s contribution to our family’s Easter traditions was getting us chocolate bunnies for those Easter baskets as well.

I don’t recall much lead up to Easter besides singing some specific songs on Palm Sunday and sometimes dying hard boiled eggs during the week before Easter.

I knew Easter was about Jesus’s resurrection, and obviously I knew he had to die at some point before he could be resurrected, but other than watching The Passion of the Christ with my youth group when it came out during my teen years, my experience of Easter was much like Christmas: the excitement was about the gifts and what I got to consume on the holiday more than about remembering the significance of what the holiday was about.

Our Family Priorities Around Easter Traditions:

Several years ago, when Mara was quite small, Gabe and I had a conversation before Easter about what we wanted to prioritize about the holiday. We certainly enjoyed the “fun” aspects of Easter (chocolate, egg hunts, family dinners, etc). But we wanted to make sure that we emphasized the historical and religious significance over the fun activities.

We were inspired by family friends that invited us to participate in a Sedar Dinner with their family the year Mara was a baby. They created a very family-friendly evening for their four children – including an audience-participatory skit about the Exodus, and a multi-sensory meal with interesting foods, “unusual” music, and shared readings.

In Exodus 12, where Moses gives the instructions for observing the Passover Celebration, verse 24-27 talk about the Passover ceremony and celebration being an opportunity to share with children about the history of the Exodus.

We were inspired to create our family’s Easter traditions around our children’s development and awareness. In a sense, celebrating Passover (and by extension, Easter) is a holiday for the purpose of educating children about God and history. So that’s our priority when it comes to Easter Traditions.

Each year, we adapt a little, but this year, as I write mid-Lent, we have been and plan to do the following:

1. Introduce Our Kids to and Observe Lent

Having grown up in a more Reformed-influenced Christian faith tradition, I was vaguely aware of Ash Wednesday. But I don’t recall ever doing anything to participate in observing Ash Wednesday.

But as I’ve learned more about the global church’s approach to Christian holidays, I have a desire to incorporate more of the historical Easter traditions into our family’s celebration. So this year, we did a history lesson on Ash Wednesday as the start of Lent. We learned about what it is, why people observe it, and how it connects to the church calendar and leading up to Easter.

We have been doing a devotional as a family during Lent called Practicing Jesus’ Seven Last Words (published by the Presbyterian Church in Canada). This has allowed us to spend time weekly focusing on different aspects of Jesus’ final moments prior to his death along with connecting those moments to our practice of following Jesus as a family.

And we have also been listening to a Kids Podcast called Catholic Sprouts most days during Lent. They are doing a series about church martyrs during Lent, leading up to remembering Jesus’s death. This has been a fun way to incorporate church history (and some geography and various other social-sciences related subjects) into car rides or chore times at home.

Overall, tapping into some diverse resources from various Christian traditions have enriched our experience of Lent. It is helping us prepare for and anticipate Easter by reminding us of how this whole season is about Jesus and the incredible sacrifice he gave to restore us into covenant and relationship with God.

My encouragement for other families as they think about their Easter Traditions would be to look beyond your own family or church “norms” to expand your tradition development.

2. Follow an Intentional Bible Reading Plan Leading Up to Easter

When Mara was about a year old, we started reading The Jesus Storybook Bible to her most evenings. We love this Storybook Bible because of how it ties all the stories back to Jesus. Over the last few years, we’ve read specific stories on specific nights leading up to Easter. These stories, and our schedule for them, are:

Spy Wednesday: Washed with Tears
Maundy Thursday: The Servant King
Good Friday: A Dark Night in the Garden
Holy Saturday: The Sun Stops Shining
Easter Sunday: God’s Wonderful Surprise

Last year, we added The Promises of God Storybook Bible (currently on sale on Amazon for only $9.80!) to our Bible Story rotation. This Storybook Bible is also a favorite – I think it does a little better job of relaying concepts and vocabulary from the Bible a little more accurately. Also, it has some great comprehension and reflection questions at the end of each story!

So this year, I plan to pull from both Storybook Bibles for our Easter Week Reading Plan:

Palm Sunday: The Promised Entry (Promises of God Storybook Bible)
Holy Monday: Washed with Tears (Jesus Storybook Bible)
Holy Tuesday: The Promised Plot (Promises of God Storybook Bible)
Spy Wednesday: The Servant King (Jesus Storybook Bible)
Maundy Thursday: The Promised Servant (Promises of God Storybook Bible)
Good Friday: A Dark Night in the Garden (JSB) AND The Promised Deliverer Delivered to Death (PoGSB)
Holy Saturday: The Sun Stops Shining (JSB) AND The Dark Promise (PoGSB)
Easter Sunday: God’s Wonderful Surprise (JSB) AND The Promised Redeemer

Yes, this is a lot of reading, but we are big readers in this family! And by focusing time on reading these stories, I believe we will be conveying to our kids the importance and value of this aspect of our Easter Traditions.

Sedar Dinner Plate for Easter Tradition Celebrations

3. Participate in a Sedar Dinner as part of our Easter Traditions

After experiencing that Sedar Dinner when Mara was a baby that our friends hosted, I’ve jumped at the chance to participate in a few more Sedar Dinners. Several years ago, I got to organize a large Sedar Dinner for my husband’s workplace. Since we had a handful of kids among us, I made a point to try to make it as kid-friendly as possible. I used this resource as my basic script and order of program.

A couple things we specifically did was:

We invited everyone to come to dinner with walking sticks, wearing jackets, and backpacks on their backs.
We had a red streamer roll for each child, and at the beginning of the dinner we took a few minutes to tape up the red streamer over all the external doors to the building.
And we had a foot washing time for the parents to all wash their children’s feet as part of the evening.

We had both the Sedar Plate with traditional and symbolic foods, as well as a meal to eat together. So the experience took a little over an hour, I think. But our kids stayed engaged and attentive because there was a lot of asking questions and interactive activities.

I don’t know if my husband’s workplace will do a Sedar Dinner this year, but if they do, we will plan to participate in it, and if they do not, we will do our own Sedar Dinner at home. If we are making our own schedule for it, we’ll probably do it on Maundy Thursday night, which will correlate nicely with the Storybook Bible reading for that night as well.

4. Initiate Conversations to Talk Through the Tragedy and Unexpected Triumphant Outcome of Holy Week

I am always surprised by the good questions our kids ask us! And I love to utilize their thoughtful curiosity and question asking to have some good, intentional conversations.

Some of the conversations that I’ve felt were most significant regarding explaining what Jesus did in dying on the cross have come up from our Bible Storybook readings. I remember Mara realizing that Jesus had lots of “owies” on his body in the illustration of him on the cross. When we explained that he got the owies because he was taking the consequences for our sins and mistakes, something significant seemed to click.

Now, to be fair, our church serves Communion (or the Eucharist) each Sunday. We have chosen to include our kids in the process of taking Communion together. So every Sunday, we spend at least a few moments remembering together how Jesus died and was resurrected. But utilizing a robust reading plan for Easter week and asking thoughtful, discussion-oriented questions as we read through the stories helps us engage more with the stories and provides lots of opportunities for personal reflection and application.

The Promises of God Storybook Bible, as I mentioned before, has some great review and discussion questions already built in to the end of each story. So we will utilize those, as well as elaborating as we think appropriate.

Easter Tradition Celebration Friends Sedar Dinner

5. Incorporate Specific Foods into our Easter Traditions

Food is such a tangible and fun way to participate in a tradition, and we have specific foods we like to eat around Easter:

First, of course, we do the Sedar Dinner, which has a lot of food elements in it!

Second, we always try to have Hot Cross Buns to eat with Easter Sunday Breakfast. Our kids love Hot Cross Buns.

I didn’t grow up with them, that I recall, but living in New Zealand, they seem to be a staple. Perhaps it is a Commonwealth thing? (Hot Cross Buns as we think of them now, apparently, originated in England, so that would make sense). It’s a simple tradition, as every supermarket in the area always has plenty of Hot Cross Buns, so if I don’t have time to make them, we can pick them up easily.

And third, we started the tradition of making Resurrection Cookies last year, and I plan to do it again this year. Resurrection Cookies include a simple list of ingredients, so they’re easy to throw together sometime Saturday before Easter Sunday. Essentially, they are a meringue-type cookie that includes several ingredients (and actions done to said ingredients) that can be used to remind kids of the Easter story.

Since taste and smell are so closely associated with our development of memories, I love incorporating these senses into our Easter Traditions.

6. Include Specific Music and Songs into our Easter Traditions

Gabe and I are both big music fans around here, although we do have some specific tastes! I am not always interest in NEW music, for example… I like to stick to my tried and true favorites. And for me, different holidays have some very specific songs that go with them.

I grew up attending a church that sung a lot of hymns (usually with just a piano accompanist), so hymns that relate to the holidays are dear to my heart. I love traditional Christmas hymns, and I love some of the hymns that we would sing every year around Easter. Gabe has a bit more awareness of modern music, so he has introduced me to many other songs that have become part of my holiday playlists.

Some of our favorite Easter songs to listen to are:

I think music can set such a beautiful atmosphere for our home, and I love intentionally choosing music to play during chore times or during the morning wake-up time. And since memories and traditions usually are tangibly tied to specific sensory experiences, I love including music in our Easter Traditions.

Fathers washing children's feet during Sedar Dinner Celebrations

7. Include our Kids (and their Toys) in Tangible Reenactments of Easter Events

And on the topic of tangible, sensory experiences, one of our favorite things to do regarding our Easter Traditions are some of the very tangible activities we do each year.

As I mentioned regarding the Sedar Dinner, we do a foot-washing time where Gabe and I wash our kids’ feet. It’s usually light hearted and fun – their feet are ticklish, and we want to make the moment warm and memorable.

But we also remind them of the Bible Stories we’ve read about how Jesus washed the feet of his disciples as a symbol of his love for them. Since we don’t regularly have a “foot washing event” with our kids, this is definitely something that is unique to our Easter Traditions.

Another very tangible activity we do is on Saturday night, before Easter Sunday morning, we have the kids choose a stuffed animal or doll or figurine. We wrap the chosen item in toilet paper, and then place it in a “tomb” for the night.

We remind them of how Jesus’ friends wrapped and buried Jesus’s body in the tomb after he died. Wrapping Comfort Items in “Burial Clothes” and “burying” them Saturday night to be “resurrected” Sunday AM.

And, as I mentioned, a new tradition for our family as of last year was to make Resurrection Cookies on Saturday before Easter. The kids love getting to make cookies with me, and I sometimes need a strong incentive to be willing to have the kids in the kitchen “helping” me, but this cookie making process was a really fun and meaningful way to bake together.

I also loved that it reinforced the act of going to bed without knowing the result, and then waking up in the morning to discover what had happened.

What Are You Doing For Easter?

Do you have Easter Traditions that incorporate remembering Jesus’s suffering, death, and resurrection in specific ways? How do you connect as a family and celebrate this significant aspect of the Christian faith?

I’d love to hear about your family’s Easter Traditions in the comments below! And if you’re going to try any of these 7 ideas for celebrating Easter, let me know which ones!