Looking for something fun and a little twisted to share with your kids this Easter?

Good early morning all!

Another holiday where small children
pee on mall workers clad in
overheated costumes.

For Christians this is Holy Week, which will culminate with Easter.  Easter is fast becoming like Christmas with many secular traditions adding to the fun of a holy festival.  The biggest is The Easter Bunny. 

Growing up, my parents had Easter Bunnies as part of the holiday decor.  We hid Easter eggs  (I'll rant about that later this week) and had baskets of candy (that had to last us until Halloween.)  My parents were pretty traditional...and therefore never really explained why there was an Easter Bunny.  It just was.

Our children were a bit more inquisitive, as they should be.  "Why is there an Easter Bunny?"  "What is the Easter Bunny's purpose?"  "Did the Easter Bunny role away the stone and get Jesus out of the tomb?"

Faced with these heavy doctrinal questions, I did what any mother with a twisted sense of drama would do:  I created an alternate story for the Easter Bunny.

In our house, it's not the Easter Bunny.  It's the Naughty Easter Rodent.  He a rabbit who somehow manages to get into the house in the wee hours of the night.  The Naughty Easter Rodent takes all the eggs we spent hours the day before boiling and coloring and he hides them.  This is very annoying to the parents because we have to be in church, singing with the choir, by 6:30 in the morning.  The Naughty Easter Rodent will, however, as a way of making peace for his naughtiness, put a small gift, usually some piece of clothing or new shoes, by the child's door in the morning.  These are clothes the child is to wear to church.  When we get home from church, we have to search the house for the eggs and at the end, the Naughty Easter Rodent also hides baskets full of small gifts and candy.

Then we sit down to a ham dinner.  After dinner we open the cellophane on the packages of Peeps so they can age and be stiff and crunchy enough to eat in about June.  (Oh you eat your Peeps fresh?  HAH!  We've got a package from two years ago sitting there, aging.  This year we have well aged Peeps on the menu!)

I'm not saying this works for everyone, and when the kids were small they were a little nervous about the Naughty Easter Rodent wandering around the house...well, they were until my daughter found her dream shoes and my son got that Pokemon shirt he wanted.

And no one in my house has ever asked me why there's an Easter Bunny.  So...win for me!