A Minimalist Easter

Easter is coming at us this weekend.

If you celebrate secular Easter, the kind that involves bunnies and chocolate and Easter egg hunts, you may have noticed that this holiday has turned into a marketing machine. Pop over to Target and see how much they are pushing. Not just chocolate bunnies and marshmallow Peeps, but gifts. Apparently Easter baskets are now supposed to be filled with books, new pyjamas and lots of goodies. The Easter basket is the mid-year Christmas stocking. It’s also an $18.1 billion dollar shopping holiday. Gulp.

This gifts for all occasions mantra can be hard for parents that want to keep things simple. I get it. My six year old wondered aloud what kind of gift he would get for Valentine’s Day this year. I guess his friends in Kindergarten told him they get gifts from their parent’s on Valentine’s Day. I had to break the news that we don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day with big gifts (we usually have a few chocolate hearts that they have at breakfast that day…. if I remember). He was disappointed but quickly got over it.

Can you have a minimalist Easter?

I’m just speaking to secular Easter right now. This is mostly about Easter Baskets and entertaining for family dinners. And I think both of those areas are great places to whittle down obligations and expectations. Why? It’s a holiday weekend! If you’ve been slaving away preparing special meals, running all over town to hit up Easter activities and heating up your credit card buying Easter gifts, and feeling stressed out, this is for you. Time to enjoy this holiday and find time to connect with your family and, also, get some rest and relaxation in.

My biggest piece of advice for parents of young children is that if you want to have a simple or minimalist Easter, start now! Do not let the Easter bar get set really high before your kids even hit preschool. Some of you can even skip buying anything for your kids if they are really young.

Or you can start a tradition for Easter that has nothing to do with receiving stuff.

Maybe you always go for a hike on Easter or invite friends over for a barbecue or make a special meal. Maybe you spend half of Easter weekend preparing for spring, switching clothes and shoes out from winter, do a few spring house tasks and order takeout as a fun reward that night. Don’t let Instagram or cultural expectations push you towards activities or stuff that doesn’t fit with your values.

What if my kids expect to get a lot of stuff at Easter?

You aren’t painted, or Mini Egg-ed, into a corner just yet. If your kid got a bike from the Easter Bunny last year you may have some work to do to lower expectations. If they are old enough to know where the Easter Bunny really lives, now may be the time to have a deeper talk about minimalism and less stuff.

If they are still quite young, but remember that they got a stuffed bunny that was taller than they are last year (plus a battery powered mini car from Grandma) gently reign in the Easter stuff. Ask relatives to tone down gifts (and next year to not give any) and have the Easter bunny bring a smaller basket this year.

Distraction is also a good tool if you are trying to change up your Easter. Find a community event to get your kids excited about, perhaps a free Easter Egg hunt or pool event. Talk about things you are going to do on the Easter weekend – pancake breakfast, story time at the library, friend over for a playdate, no school!- so your kids are less focused on Easter candy and gifts.

It’s a good time to plant the seeds for a minimalist Easter next year.

If you have generous relatives or have dialled up Easter to a level that’s a burden for you, plant the seeds for a slower and simple Easter next year. A few weeks after Easter, thank you generous relatives again and then mention you want to try to keep the gifts smaller next year. Brain storm some easier ways to celebrate and put them in your diary for next year. This is a bit like the Christmas conundrum: you can’t spring a simpler Christmas on family the week before the big event. You plant seeds all year long, have conversations and slowly start to change how you celebrate. So put that big smile on when your aunt gives your three year old a two foot chocolate bunny… and have a conversation about next year a few weeks or even months later.

Love filling Easter baskets with treats and feeling guilt reading this? Don’t. Do what makes you happy.

I love trying new recipes at Easter and making old favourites. I will likely spend a good five to six hours cooking and baking over the weekend. I really enjoy cooking and, now that my kids are older and play well independently, I have the time to do it. One of my kids has asked repeatedly that we do an egg hunt at home so we will. There also may be, weather permitting, a water balloon and water gun fight (kids just being allowed to have water guns this year). And I plan to make the time for a few hours of afternoon reading for myself, a workout or two and putting my feet up. The kind of minimalism and simplicity I write about on this blog leaves lots of room for doing what brings you joy. Even if that joy comes from water balloon fights and slow roasted Porchetta.

How do you navigate holidays that are often filled with lots of gifts and busyness? 

More about simple holidays:

  • Hi, I’m Christy and I’m a single mom of 3 boys, two are still at home, twins age 16. I am a minimalist and don’t buy gifts for anything but their birthday and Christmas. We celebrate each holiday for what it is. For us, Easter is a religious holiday and a time to spend together. I can’t stand all the consumerism with all holidays now, it is just over the top. My kids have always understood that we don’t function that way and they have grown up happily without all the massive amounts of “stuff “that their friends have. What they have they enjoy but it’s just not a lot. One of my sons said to me after spending the day at a friends house, “I didn’t like it over there, they have too much stuff”. I just laughed.

  • Hi Rachel, I’m so glad you wrote on a post on this, because Easter has become such a commercialized holiday and it doesn’t have to be at all. I had my first child last September, and though she’s just a little baby, I’ve been putting a lot of thought into what kind of rituals and traditions I want our family to keep.

    I feel like Easter is such an important tradition because it’s ushering in the spring, welcoming the arrival of warm weather and green plants and leaves on trees, and saying goodbye to those short winter days.

    I’ve never been drawn to the mainstream ways of celebrating it, so I came up with the idea of having my parents hide colored eggs all over their large property and drawing a map, and then taking R on a treasure hunt of sorts. That’s what we ended up doing this year and it was so fun and interesting, we decided that it will be our Easter tradition from now on.

    I’m even thinking that when she’s a bit older, I’ll hide eggs along a hiking trail the day before, and then Easter day pack up drinks and snacks and go on a long hiking-hunt. There are just so many other options out there other than a community egg hunt and a candy-filled Easter basket. I’m so glad you’re reminding people of this. Simple is always better.

    (And by the way, my parents filled the eggs they hid on their property with little bits of change, so every year R can put what she finds into a piggy bank and learn how to save money)

  • I’ve been thinking about mini eggs all week! Back when I was a child and old enough to read, my dad did a fun Easter chocolate hunt. In my Easter basket there would be a note with a clue of where a chocolate treat was hidden. When I found each chocolate treat, there would be another note, leading me to the next. I would find chocolate all over the house, including the washing machine. It was a ton of fun. Now that I’m a grandma, I had fun this year putting some Easter decorations up for the first time ever for my granddaughter who is 13 months. We’ll be keeping gifts for her minimal as she grows up, as my daughter’s in laws have more money than we do, travel a lot etc, so we really can’t compete with that, nor do we want to. I’m hoping my grand daughter will have special memories of seeing the same Easter decorations up every year and enjoying a great meal and a couple small gifts. I didn’t have a grand mother’s house to visit growing up, so I’m conscious about wanting to create some good memories.

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