If you had Easter egg hunts as a kid, what were they like?

Well, they certainly weren’t full of competitive parents snatching eggs from toddlers.

I never went to a “public” egg hunt, though. My parents would hide plastic eggs filled with candy around the house and then my siblings and I would try to find them. We did the same thing with warm/cold when one of us was having trouble locating one. Though one time I remember someone found one of the eggs a few months later—the candy inside was still good :P

It usually coincided with the annual government mandated interrogation training, so we would capture and torture our parents until they revealed the locations of the easter nests.

My parents would just hide a fuckton of candy around the house while my sister and I were still sleeping. Things like jelly beans would be inside plastic eggs, but there were also lots of individually-wrapped chocolates and things that could be hidden without an egg. We’d wake up and toddle around and fill up our baskets. I have to assume my parents were doing something to prevent my (older) sister from getting all the candy and leaving little-me in the dust, but I was oblivious. Inevitably there would be some that we didn’t find, and my parents didn’t remember every little item, so months later we’d find some chocolate that had melted in the sun somewhere, lmao.

I actually did an easter-egg hunt at my in-laws house yesterday! Pretty adorable considering that even their youngest child is college-age, haha. They’d hard-boiled some eggs for us before we arrived, and we painted them, and then later they hid them around outside – 2 dozen hard-boiled eggs – and we turned it into a competition – Matt and me versus his sister and her boyfriend. Matt and I won by 2 eggs and we got a dollar. It was pretty fun to get to pretend to be a kid again, haha.

We had dye kits for real eggs, my parents would hide them after we were done dying them.

Upsetting when I found out that I had to eat the eggs later. I don’t want toxic chemicals in my eggs.

We use(d) real eggs that are decorated by the kids. The hunt is a frenzy – more people than eggs – but still fun.

I’ve never been to a public Easter egg hunt either @DominicY. But we drove by one last year and parents were out there running around with the kids. I asked someone who went what that was all about and they told me. Disgusting.

@RedDeerGuy1 Poor guy! They didn’t tell you it was just food coloring?

Here are some hard boiled eggs I had the kids paint with gel food coloring, before I made deviled eggs. It worked well. The only problem was, when they were flipped over and filled with yolk mix you couldn’t see the colors. Next year I’ll just have them paint the rims.

We never ate our Easter eggs. Mom was concerned, and rightly so, IMO, that after hours at room temperature and then hours out in the sun, there was a good chance they’d be spoiled.

@Dutchess_III I made them. I didn’t know that I would have to eat them. My grandmother just died from stomach cancer in 1986 . I believe it was from the food coloring and expired cheese.

In our house, there wasn’t an egg hunt. A dozen eggs would be hard-boiled by Mom and then dyed by the kids. We also dyed egg shells that Mom had saved up and then hang them on the little tree in the front yard. The neighbors loved it.

Our hunt was for the Easter baskets. We each had one or two, depending on their sizes. Our names were taped to the basket handles and then put out in the living room before going to bed. During the night, the Easter Bunny would come. The baskets would be filled with candy and then hidden throughout the house. Should a sibling find another’s basket before the owner did, the taunting would start.

Dad, a.k.a. EB, could be ruthless with the hiding places. One was tucked under two sofa cushions and the handle hidden by a throw pillow. One was hidden in the back of the dishwasher behind some big plates. There was one in the desk garbage can under discarded paper. The best was hanging it in the clothes chute dangling from a long string. The man must have spent twelve months each year scheming up new devious hiding places.

Why in the world would you think she died of food coloring @RedDeerGuy1?

What egg shells did she dye @Pied_Pfeffer? How did she hang them up?

@Dutchess_III She used lots of old school expired food factory made coloring In her foods. She used lots of it and we would drink it straight. She died of stomach cancer and I needed something to explain why she died. My dad warned the family not to eat her preserves. Also she ate lots of expired moldy cheese so that could be it too. I don’t know what killed her but those were the few things that she did differently than others. I was 9 years old at the time.

Pretty sure the cheese would just make you sick. It wouldn’t give you cancer. And why would you drink food coloring straight? It doesn’t even taste like anything.

@Dutchess_III I liked the green food colouring. It tasted good. It had a flavor. Not just for cookies. It came from the 1970’s or earlier. My grandma had a secret sash over the fridge. I also found her stash of chocolate bars and my grandpas macadamia nuts and pecans. I was just a kid at the time. So I believed whatever made sense at the time.

@Dutchess_III Mom would fry eggs and bacon every Sunday for breakfast. The egg shells from this meal were what was used to hang on the tree each year. We kids would dye them first, and then she would poke a pinhole in its side and run a piece of thread through it, tying it so that it was in a loop to hang on the tree, like this.

Oh, OK! I understand. So they were half shells. That’s a keen idea, actually!

Wow. I just looked at your picture. Did she save the shells all year long?

Yes, ours were half shells. Probably because most family members liked their eggs fried and not scrambled. To keep the shells whole, it’s just a matter of poking a hole on each end and blowing the contents out. Then tie a bit of thread around a portion of toothpick and feed the toothpick bit through the eggshell hole. The ends of the toothpick catch to the inner edges of the eggshell.

There’s a “lovely” photo of my sister and me standing next to the decorated Easter Tree in our matching homemade pink Easter dresses with headbands lurking about somewhere, but it isn’t scanned or I would share it.

I never heard of Easter egg hunts until I was an adult.

We never did much but a few Easters stand out.

I remember doing the thing where my mom would poke a few holes in the eggs and then blow the insides out. Then we would use one of those kits with the pellets and metal hoops to dye the eggs. I don’t remember doing any easter egg hunts or anything. It was just fun to make patterns on the eggs. Then she would stick them in our basket.

We didn’t really get much candy in our Easter baskets. She would get us video games for the Atari and I got a lot of drafting templates similar to that.

Two Easters before I was ten years old ended with a trip to the hospital.

1st ER trip…. I was about six and my mom got me aluminum baseball bat and a ball and a glove. Mother was pitching, sister was hitting, and I was catching. So much blood.. The rest of the day was spent in the ER patching up my face.

2nd ER trip… I was about seven and it was Easter and we were enjoying a nice BBQ and eating some watermelon. Apparently bees love watermelon and I am a sloppy eater. I got attacked and was rushed to the ER.

That was pretty much the end of us doing anything for Easter. It is now the holiday we ignore.

I remember one we had. Most memorable!
It was raining and we had to hide the eggs in the house. Afterwards, I remember hiding one somewhere in the kitchen but couldn’t remember exactly where. 6 months later I found it.

I learned about the big hole, little hole thing, and blowing the insides out of an egge, sort of like a science experiment in elementary school. It was really cool! But I thought, what a waste of eggs! Or, maybe the teacher took them home. IDK.

Only went to one Easter egg hunt. I was about 4 years old. It was inside my babysitter’s house. I was told to go look for eggs. I opened a closet and saw an egg inside of a shoe. I thought, “That is just too weird!”. I closed the door and stopped looking for eggs.

We didn’t have Easter Egg hunts in our house. I guess maybe because we were Jewish? Or, maybe because our town had one? We did decorate eggs and eat chocolate bunnies and sweet marshmallow peeps in my house.

The Easter egg hunts in my town when I was little were at a big park. The eggs were just dropped all across the lawn. We ran around the park, and picked up plastic eggs full of candy. We also received extra goody bags I think?

Later in the day I think there were watermelon eating contests and some other activities. That might have been a different spring festival we did those things. I don’t remember well.

LOL! You decorated eggs and ate Easter candy on Easter, and did all kinds of stuff associated with Easter, but didn’t hide eggs because you’re Jewish! Funny!

We had a little church just a few blocks from our house. It was not the church we attended. However, we went to Sunrise Services at that church on Easter morning. Ga.

There is nothing christian about the easter bunny and her eggs. This is completely pagan.

We know that. Same with Christmas.

anyone who does anything with the lagomorph iconography will go straight to hell.

LOL!

My son’s going to hell. He said, “Don’t you find it ironic that it is Good Friday…and this is the day Jesus died?!”
My husband said, “Yeah, but he came back to life on Sunday!”
My son said, “With one hell of a hang over!”
I suppose I’m going to hell too because I laughed.
He also got tickled at the fact that I make deviled eggs every Easter.
So going to hell we are.

@Dutchess_III Yeah, it makes no real sense, but made sense to my mom. Lol. My maternal side of the family were artists and chocoholics, and Easter is a good holiday for those things, so I figure that’s why we did parts of the holiday. It’s possible she didn’t do an Easter egg hunt in the house, because there was one in town that she took us to. Maybe laziness? Or, money? I think most likely she just didn’t have it herself as a child.

I didn’t know the Easter Bunny was like Santa until a few years ago. I didn’t know the Easter Bunny hid the eggs and left gifts or Easter baskets in some houses.

That’s what’s so lovely about the innocence of children. We all went back to school and shared stories about our Easter weekend and never gave a thought as to why it was conducted differently in our friends’ homes.

And it’s actually kind of a shock when you grow up and find out some people have chicken and noodles as part of their Thanksgiving dinner @Pied_Pfeffer!

In our house @JLeslie, the bunny had to find the eggs the kids hid the night before Easter.

I guess our holidays didn’t have the “magic” part. Fun and food yes, but not the magic or fooling the children with made up stories. Not that I have any problem with Santa or the Easter Bunny, I’m just fine with those stories and rituals.

Yep. Those stories will bite you in the butt @JLeslie! But it’s fun. I’ll never forget one memorial Easter. Our tradition was to hide the eggs from the bunny on Easter Eve, and he had to come in in the night and find them.
One year, when my daughter was about 8 and my son was 6, for some inexplicable reason they wouldn’t allow me to watch them hide the eggs. They refused to explain, just sent me away.
Well, that night the bunny found all but one of the eggs. He hunted for 2 weeks, could NOT find it! That one egg drove him insane! I mean who wants a hard boiled egg lost somewhere in the house? Have you ever smelled an egg 3 weeks after Easter?
Of course, I couldn’t see anything, but I could sense the children’s glee. They knew they had me over a barrel!
Then, one night, 2 weeks later, I bolted up right, out of a dead sleep at about 2 a.m. and whispered, “MY FICUS!”
I threw myself out of bed and began frantically digging in the dirt of my large ficus tree…and there it was, buried about 6” down!
The little shits!
Just last year I thought to ask my daughter whey they threw me out that night. Did they know I was the Easter Bunny? She said, “We didn’t really think you were the Easter Bunny, but we figured you were in cahoots with him! That was so funny, Mom. I’ll never forget it! We checked that plant 5 times a day to see if it was still there.”
That’s when it clicked…I must have subconsciously noted the disturbed dirt in my plant, and my brain put it all together, all of a sudden, that night.
It is a wonderful memory that makes us all laugh today.

What? I thought it would have started to sprout! You’d have been the first person in history to have a real live Easter egg tree!