Chirped by Tina
The stay-at-home orders can’t keep the holidays from arriving on schedule, and it’s Easter weekend already! While we can’t do our big family get-togethers in person this year, here are a few last minute tips for enjoying a fun Easter gathering – from a distance!
Zoom It!
Whatever your preferred virtual meeting platform is, schedule a big family meetup on Easter Sunday! Where else do they all need to be this weekend, right? Zoom, WebEx, Skype, FaceTime… whatever works and can handle multiple families joining in. We’ve been having a great time doing Zoom and FaceTime happy hours with friends and family. Facetime is easy if everyone has an iPhone, but for the Android users, sign up for one of the other services. We successfully hosted 14 people on a book club Zoom meeting a couple of weeks ago, and it worked quite well! A lot of students have upgraded Zoom accounts that will allow unlimited meeting lengths, unlike the free version, that cuts you off at 40 minutes. I opted to upgrade for a month, at a cost of about $15, and it has been well worth it for the amount of entertainment we’ve gotten out of “seeing” our friends as often as we have. Our virtual social life is booming, and we have a plan to see about 30 relatives this Sunday! Our hostess has set a schedule for each family to be able to talk and update everyone on what’s going on with them – so we don’t have TOO much talking over each other. We’ll see how that works. I think there will still be a lot of folks chiming in with questions and comments, but having a little structure might help?
Personalized Coloring Pages
For the younger cousins, I’ve been working on personalized eggs to color, as a different sort of Easter activity. Once I’ve finished, I can email them to their parents to print out on their home printers. That’s assuming they all have one? With ink?? I’m using AdobeSketch on my iPad, drawing with an iPencil. It works great, because if I make a mistake, I can “Undo” the last line (or lines) with a click. You could always draw them on a regular piece of paper in pencil first, and then go over the lines with a Sharpie when you’re done, too. Then take a picture or scan it and send it to your own nephews, nieces, grand kids, cousins, etc…
In some communities, I’ve seen a trend towards taping paper eggs in your house’s windows. Neighborhood kids can “find” them as they drive through – like a long-distance egg hunt! Could be a good place to display these eggs – once they’re colored in…
Long-Distance Scavenger Hunt
I’m still working out the details with the parents in our family, but we’re thinking the kids could have their own, interactive, Zoom scavenger hunt going before the grownups all get “together” to talk and do boring stuff… lol. The idea is to take a scavenger hunt template we found online at My Sister’s Suitcase, and adapt it for our own purposes. If each child is assigned one of the clues, then even if they don’t have a color printer, the parents could just draw/write out the one clue assigned to their child and place it in the location described by the previous clue. Sound complicated? Yeah, it’s a work in progress…
For example, when the clue about the dryer is read by Jumping Joey, all the kids would run to their own dryer to see if they have the next clue. Maybe everyone’s dryer has a little treat of some sort in it? But only Lucky Lili finds the next clue in her dryer. Lili then tells all the other kids “I’ve got it!” and reads off where they should check for the next clue. This way everyone gets a turn reading a clue. Big kids (or parents) can help the little ones as needed. At the end of the hunt, we may put more treats and a longer list of items to collect from around the house. Something to keep them busy for a while. (-; Again, the bigger kids could help the little ones think where they might be able to find “a picture of your family”, or “a toy that’s bigger than your hand, but smaller than your dog”, or “a dust bunny!” Lol. I’ll let you all know how this pans out later. And if you decide to try it, get creative and tell us what you did!
Easter Cookies
Always a favorite in our family, you can still make Easter cookies without leaving the house! You might not have access to the fancy tubes of icing, but you can make your own. Might not look quite as vibrant, but it’ll taste just as delicious! (If you’re a hoarder like me, you still have tubes leftover from last Christmas/Easter/Halloween that you can pull out for the occasion, too.) Since the dough has to chill, make it up on Saturday. Depending on how “helpful” the kids are, you might want to make the cookies ahead of time, too. Here’s a Betty Crocker recipe for butter cream frosting (I don’t know why they say not to use liquid food coloring – I always do!) I use my mom’s recipe (pictured below) for the cookies. There are lots of others online (with less butter and eggs). If you don’t have fancy shaped cookie cutters, make your own egg shapes using a floured water glass rim. Then trim a little off the sides with a butter knife to make the smaller end. I’ve also linked a tutorial I found for making a pastry bag out of a ziplock if you want to get “fancy”! 
Easter Dinner
Just because it’s not a big crowd, doesn’t mean you can’t cook something Easter-y for the family. I love these ham and cheese sliders that Cass makes – if you can find slider buns at the grocery store these days! I’m also going to try this potato and ham soup recipe – I’ve got all the ingredients except the American cheese, but I bet I can substitute cheddar! Mmmm….
Wherever you’re sheltering, we hope you enjoy a safe, healthy Easter celebration (from a distance) with your families this weekend! Let us know in the comments section if you have any other tips to share about how you’ve modified your gathering to accommodate social distancing! Be well, and Happy Easter!
Related Posts
- Flock Together: Prepping for the Big Easter Gathering!
- Painted Keepsake Eggs for Easter
- Halloween Care Package
- The Feather Hoarder
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Those are pretty cookies. I am a bit of a hoarder too. I make Easter cookies every year and even pass some out to the neighbors. Their cookie bags were a little short this year of course with each neighbor getting only six cookies per house. I only gave out 5 bags. We have to conserve our food for the next few weeks because of the lock down but traditions are traditions and I love sharing Easter cookies with everyone.