How to Organize An Easter Egg Hunt

This clever spin on the traditional Easter egg hunt is participant specific.

CREATIVE SOLUTION | At first it felt unnatural to hide plastic eggs instead of real ones because we didn’t grow up hunting for plastic on Easter so having our kids do so felt not only anti-Martha but like some kind of cheesy cop-out. But at some point it stopped being okay to sacrifice three dozen perfectly good hard-boiled eggs to the springtime muck in our backyard just so our kids and their friends could charge around Easter morning and ideally find them—yet never eat them.

So we have changed our tune and completely switched over to plastic, keeping the hand-decorated chicken eggs in the fridge for snacks or sandwiches. The plastic eggs have proved fantastic because we can hunt for them outdoors in all weather conditions and recycle them year after year.

Here’s how our hunt works:

How Our Hunt For All Age Groups Works

Our kids get a large and almost empty basket on Easter morning and it’s their job to fill it up. It contains the following:

1. One lovely, large, good-quality chocolate treat or painted cookie.

2. A non-edible gift and a plastic egg or two filled with candy we know they like

The egg(s) in each basket is/are in a colour or pattern unique to that basket, and the hunter will be looking for a set number of identical eggs.

The beauty of running our Easter egg hunt in this fashion is that we can tailor the contents of the eggs (treats, toys, money, whatever) to each participant and make finding them as difficult or as easy as we want.

Also each hunter is competing against him or herself alone, and when someone runs into an egg that doesn’t belong to them they can leave it where they find it or give it to the person it’s intended for. —Olivia Pittman

Photos: iStock