Creating Easter Traditions

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When Miriam and I were little, our Mom would spend sleepless nights at the sewing machine making us dresses for Easter Sunday.  My favorite Easter dress was a lavender calico with white eyelet lace.  I was eight, and I thought I looked like a princess.  Looking back, I realize that I look more like a crooked-tooth Mennonite in a gunny sack, but it doesn't matter.  When I see pictures of that dress, I only remember the love of my mother 

and the feeling of Easter on my skin. 

I would love to carry on the same tradition for my boys, but I'm no seamstress, and I don't think they'd look too kindly on having to wear a dress to church.  I've tried to get them to wear stylish coordinating ties for Easter Sunday, but one of those ties inevitably ends up lying in a pool of liquid, or tied around another sibling rodeo-style, or stuffed beneath the car seat with two petrified french fries and the remnants of a chicken nugget.  I feel lucky if I can just get everyone to church in matching socks.  Stylish ties never make the cut.

What has made the cut on Easter Sunday is our breakfast basket tradition.  I've never been a huge fan of Easter baskets filled with candy.  We're STILL picking through Valentine's Day party candy at our house, and I certainly don't need to add jelly beans and chocolate bunnies to the mix.  So we've made a happy compromise with our breakfast baskets:  

I stuff the baskets full of gaggy breakfast foods that we never let them eat, 

it provides at least two nutrition-lacking meals on the busiest Sunday of the year, 

and the kids think it's the best Easter tradition ever.

Here is what this year's baskets looked like (excepting the one that was a Harry Potter cauldron from Halloween because Mom forgot to count the baskets before it was too late):

Today's Easter Breakfast Basket Menu

individual boxes of sugar-laced cereals

yogurts with granola

juice (I mean 10% juice blends)

chocolate milk

bananas

pancakes and sausage on a stick

toaster strudels

powdered donuts

and

a chocolate bunny (so sue me).

I certainly won't be winning any "Excellence in Dietetics" awards any time soon, but at least I won't be finding jelly beans stuffed in my DVD player either.  

Besides, just look at this face.  He and his brothers are the happiest little Easter bunnies around.  The only thing that could make me happier is if they were all wearing coordinating ties.  Well, maybe next Easter . . .

May your entire Easter Sunday---from breakfast to bedtime---be full of joyous traditions!