Coordinating Easter

It sounds horrible - "Coordinating Easter". After all, Easter is all about celebrating the death and resurrection of our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Full stop. That should be enough. But as a family, it's not simply a matter of just going to church and celebrating that victory and coming home and having family time together to mark this occasion. It should be as simple as that, but it's simply not. Unfortunately.

Yes, Easter itself is really just about Christ and what He has done for us, but there are other elements of Easter as well... the family time to celebrate together, the chocolate aspect of it and the Easter Egg hunt the chocolate entails. I grew up with that and I don't want to deprive Little Spring of memories like that either.

I'm proud that we have the true meaning of Easter understood:

Little Spring the other morning when I was warming up hot cross buns: "Mummy, cross. Died."
Me: "That's right, Jesus died on the cross, but what does Easter mean?"
Little Spring: "Alive!"

So, with that taken care of (!) I need to coordinate our family time over the Easter period. Last year (our first in our first parish), we didn't actually think about it and celebrated it on Sunday... but it (egg hunt) didn't happen until after 4pm, when Big Spring got back from his last service and was very exhausted from the long day.

In light of that, this year we decided to celebrate on Easter Saturday. That's Big Spring's semi day off so thought that would be perfect. Except that that didn't happen very well. Even before we'd sat down to breakfast, he received his first phone call... which then turned into his second phone call shortly after. Not to mention all the other pastoral things that sprung up during the day including a requested hospital visit plus his Easter service final preparations.

After that experience, we decided that next year we are going to try for Easter Monday instead. He takes the week off after Easter, so Monday will definitely be his day off as we'll be on holidays, and we'll be able to have a full day of family celebrations.

Let's wait and see if that finally works!

I'm very curious to know what others of my readers who are in the ministry (or who grew up in the ministry) do over Easter to celebrate as a family, coordinating around Easter services? What works/doesn't work for you? I'd love to get some new and different ideas to see what might also work for us!