Easter Traditions: The Early Years

Easter traditions at our house began when mom and dad started their family. Looking back in pictures it was clear that mother loved Easter! Even before church services were a part of our family's lives, new sweaters and bow ties, dresses and bonnets, set the tone of what would become an important Easter tradition for years to come. 

Baskets, left by the Easter bunny, filled with candy, chocolate bunnies, colored eggs, and toys, were hidden throughout the house and sometimes the yard. Easter was not only a day to wear new clothes, but it was a day of fun. Feasting on marshmallow peeps, chocolate treats, and colored hard boiled eggs before breakfast didn't happen on any other day other than Easter and Christmas.  

Pictures paint the celebration of Easter in those early years.

Patty, firstborn and oldest sister (1954)

Patty, Carol, Bill (1959) Logan

Bill, Kelley, Patty, Carol (1960) Logan

My earliest memories of Easter came when I was 4 or 5 years old. It wasn't about the basket, but the dress, hat, little white purse, and white gloves to wear to church.

back row - Bill, Patty, Carol
front row - Steven, Kelley, Leslie 
(1966) Spring Glen

This year was one of my earliest recollections of having an Easter basket. I would have been 8 years old. Mom made bunny baskets out of Clorox jugs. She spent many days, prior to Easter, making pom poms out of white and colored sheets of plastic, attaching them to wire. and poking them into the jugs. I remember how excited I was to find my Clorox bunny basket filled with candy on Easter morning. I believe my bunny was yellow... or was it pink?

back row - Patty, middle row - Jonathan (Navajo brother), Bill, Carol, front row - Leslie, Steven, Kelley (1969) Spring Glen

Any 11 year old girl would remember how fun it was to wear matching dresses with her sisters! Yellow... the perfect spring color. 

It was in my pre-teen and teen years that I remember Easter outings in the cedars or on the desert. Dad cooked a dutch oven meal once in awhile, but I mostly remember mom's picnic meal of delicious fried chicken, potato salad, cinnamon rolls, chocolate chip cookies, or brownies. 

We hunted for Easter eggs... the real ones that we colored for the Easter egg hunt. We played in the sand. We climbed rocks and crawled through narrow slots. The landscape was full of unique sand rock formations. Climbing rocks and discovering secret passages and caves were the highlight of all my Easter outings. 

Easter never came without the wind... especially on the desert. I remember the wind blowing sand in my eyes one year. They were sore and red by the time we got home. I couldn't open my eyes up in the morning because they were so full of "junk". For a long time I thought it was the "sand man" who came and put sand in my eyes. After a visit to the doctor, I found out the real reason for my sore red eyes.... "pink eye!" A highly contagious eye infection. I remember having to put some kind of cream or drops in my eye and having to use my own towel to dry my eyes and hands on so I wouldn't spread the infection to family members. Seems like I got "pink eye" more than once on an Easter outing. 

Easter in my early years became the foundation to traditions that I would pass on to my own family. 

Attending church on Easter Sunday and celebrating the Savior's resurrection was first and foremost the most important part of Easter.

A new dress for church and finding a basket full of candy left by the Easter bunny were other fun Sunday memories. 

Saturday picnics on the desert and among the cedar trees, Easter egg hunts, and climbing rocks were activities reserved for Saturday.

One other memory that made a lasting impression on the way I celebrate Easter was the Easter lily that mom bought every year. I always loved the beautiful white petals, delightfully fragrant flower, and the meaning I associated with it. "New life"... just as the resurrection of the Savior provides "new life" for us. Everlasting life! 

Easter became one of my most loved holiday's 

of the year because of the traditions that mom and dad started at home.