I’ve been thinking about Easter and its religious significance, and I wanted to make this year’s celebration a more personal and spiritual experience for myself.  So, when I read Eric Hunstman’s article (here) on how his family observes Easter, I jumped on his tradition of reading in the New Testament each day of the week before Easter about that day on the last week of the Savior’s mortal life.  For each day of the week, he’s posted a simple list of scripture references from the four Gospels detailing what happened on the correlative day of the week of the first Easter.  I’m sure this isn’t a new idea and that I could probably find a similar list in the LDS Bible Dictionary or by googling it, but that’s where I found it and I give him credit.

Each day’s reading so far has only taken a few minutes to read, and I’ve found myself coming away wanting to know and understand more.  So I checked out the New Testament institute manual lessons about that time period here.  It’s really helpful to have the added context of maps and historical details and discussions of how the passages of scripture relate to each other.  I definitely recommend spending the extra time reading about the events of Easter there.

Easter and Passover overlap this year, and I’ve been thinking about their intertwined messages.  Since I was a little girl when we lived in Israel, my parents have participated in a Passover seder every year.  I haven’t been able to join them in a long time, but I remember our seders as some of the most meaningful celebrations of my life.  I miss them!  I really should find a community seder to attend someday.  I wonder if Colin would want to go with me.  I just looked it up and there’s one in Berkeley tomorrow.   That would be a totally appropriate Family Home Evening…but it’s $45 each!  Eeek.   And how would I explain the wine to my kids… and our no alcohol thing to the hosts?  Maybe another year.  And I have a box of Matzah in the cupboard for my own mini-celebration of the Exodus.   There is a lot to be grateful for this week.

Speaking of Family Home Evening, we should have an Easter FHE tomorrow.  If we do, and it were to go the way I planned it (it never does), this is how I’d do it:

Song: Did Jesus Really Live Again?

Prayer

Lesson: Watch the DVD of “To This End Was I Born” (or on YouTube here), or the shorter “Lamb of God” video if we have less time

Talk about what we saw.  Discuss how the symbols of eggs and flowers and Spring itself point to Jesus Christ and the resurrection.

Activity: Dyeing eggs is an obvious one.  Or we could perform our talents for our family reunion talent show–Grandma wants at least one of the kids to recite the 13th Article of Faith. I’m not totally confident that any of them will be able overcome their stage fright, but maybe practicing would help.

Song: I Know That My Redeemer Lives

Prayer

Refreshments:  How about these cute little chocolate “nests” with jellybeans for eggs?  They look super easy.  They have the added advantage of being gluten-free, which is good because we found out a couple of months ago that Colin is gluten-intolerant so he has to eat food that has no wheat in it.  If we wanted to get more complicated, I’ll bet we could use our favorite 5 Minute Cookies recipe to make the nests.

Simpler, we could just distribute Peeps.  I’m not all that into them taste-wise, but have to admit they are cute.  And it would get the kids in bed sooner.

Possibly more yummy, but certainly less dessert-y, would be deviled eggs.

Hey, these bunnies are adorable and look easy and kid friendly!

Can you tell I like dessert?

• Creamed eggs (make a white sauce/roux and add cubed hard boiled eggs, salt, pepper, and paprika) poured over biscuits or cornbread
• French toast–we made this this year and it was great
• German pancakes (let me know if you're interested in this family recipe–the presentation is pretty impressive with the fluffiness)
• Omelets
• Colin wanted to make egg-salad sandwiches, but I couldn't get over their un-breakfasty-ness and vetoed it.  Maybe if we'd had english muffins to put the egg salad on…
• Eggs Benedict
• Poached eggs
• How about funny-face eggs?  With a hard boiled egg cut in half to make eyes, then other breakfasty stuff to make the rest of the face.

For example, when the Israelites were getting ready for the last plague in Egypt, they were told to sacrifice a perfect, white, first-born lamb and put its blood above their doors to signal God to pass over their home and not let their first born child die.  Later, God commanded them to repeat this every year (Passover) so that they would not forget that He saved them that night.  Another layer of symbolism is that Jews in ancient times were told by God to sacrifice perfect, white, first-born lambs in their place at the Jewish temple in Jerusalem.  As Christians, we believe that these lambs represent Jesus Christ and the atonement–that Jesus was God's perfect, clean, first-born son who suffered and bled and died in our place and took our sins away.  The blood sacrifices were an in-your-face way to show the people that our sins aren't pretty and Christ taking them away wasn't easy, but it was done anyway because God loves us.  Thinking about the sacrifice of a lamb can help us to better understand and appreciate the Atonement of Jesus, even though we don't practice blood sacrifice now that Jesus fulfilled the law.

The Passover is all about becoming clean through the Messiah and being grateful to God for saving us from death and sin. 

Of course, in order to teach a lesson on the Passover as related to Easter, one would have to understand a little bit more than average about Passover.  The Jewish guide to the Passover Seder (feast) is called a "Haggadah," and haggadot explain how a Jewish passover should be conducted and the significance of the Exodus, so that's a good place to start.  You can find a simple, fun version of the haggadah like the one my family uses when we hold a seder.   

For the opening song, we'll probably do "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam."  Then we'll have a prayer.

I'm planning to take the lesson from this Friend article where they have flannel board figures you can print and cut out of Jesus on the cross and in Gethsemane, then the women meeting him at the tomb.  I'll tell an abbreviated version of the Easter story for the babies.

Then we can color Easter eggs for an activity.

Then a closing song of "Do As I'm Doing," Degen's current favorite song, and a prayer. 

I saw a cute treat where they made thumbprint cookies with frosting and pastel jelly beans as cookie easter baskets, so maybe I'll do that.

I saw another Easter lesson where they filled a bunch of plastic eggs with lines of testimony about Jesus, then gave someone the basket with the eggs and egg-shaped cookies frosted to look like easter eggs.  That would be a fun one to do with older kids who can write.

And, of course, there's my parent's awesome Passover Seder (dinner) that they do every year that would be perfect to do as an Easter time FHE for grownups.