I love going out to local Easter events and we normally visit an Easter trail or two. They are a great excuse to get out and motivate the children to go on a walk even if it's cold. Our favourited Easter tradition though is to have an Easter Egg Hunt at home so I'm sharing what we do.

Working together to find the hidden eggs

How To Do An Easter Egg Hunt At Home

What Day Should You Have Your Easter Egg Hunt?

We always have our Easter Egg Hunts on Easter Sunday as this the traditional day. Increasingly it seems that people can’t wait for all the chocolatey goodness though and last year on my social media loads of people had cracked into their eggs on Good Friday. We'll be sticking with Sunday though. Easter Sunday is the end of Lent and the day which represents Jesus’ resurrection. We aren’t religious, but I like a tradition. 

This is an interesting article about Easter Egg Hunts; apparently Queen Victoria organised them for her children on Maundy Thursday. Like so many of our holiday traditions that come from the Victorians maybe we should be following her lead to have them earlier? In short: have your Easter Egg Hunt when works for you. 

We always have our egg hunt in the morning for the simple reason that it gives my children more time to eat the chocolate and sweets before bedtime. Easter Sunday is the one day of the year I let my children go crazy and they are allowed to eat as many of their treats as they want. We find they have an initial binge then mostly ignore them for the rest of the day. 

AD-Gifted. Some of this year's NOMO Easter range which is vegan, nut-free, gluten-free, egg-free and dairy-free

Where To Have Your Easter Egg Hunt

Unless we are on holiday we have our Easter Egg Hunt at home. It’s easier to control than having it in a public space like a park because you don’t need to worry about other people finding the treats. Ideally we have the egg hunt in the garden, but the British weather doesn’t always play fair so we have had it inside on a few occasions. Last year we were in a caravan and it was raining, but the children loved running around the caravan looking for all the eggs. 

How To Organise your Easter Egg Hunt

The obvious way to have Easter Egg Hunts is to get your Easter eggs and hide them around your garden or house while the children are distracted, then let them look for them (a good way to distract them is to give them Easter crafts, like these or these). 

A variation is to have clues to follow to find out where the treats are hidden. Each hiding place has the next clue with a big pile of treats at the end. This works really well if you have to do it in your house so they don't end up tearing the place apart looking for chocolate. Making the clues quite difficult can be a great way to get teenagers interested in the Easter Egg Hunt.

We normally have a combination of eggs, chocolate, sweets and Easter themed treats which don’t hide as well so years ago I invested in a load of plastic fillable eggs which we use each year. The size and quality of them are variable, but they sell them in most shops in the run up to Easter.

If we have some small treats (eg the mini bags of Haribos or some Easter stickers) I put them inside the plastic eggs, but for the larger treats I write the prize on a slip of paper and put the paper inside the egg. When they open the plastic egg after the hunt and they read the message I hand over the item from a big box. 

Whether inside or out I get my partner to distract the children and I go and hide the eggs. You could hide them over night, but I suspect this would encourage my children to wake up even earlier than normal to find them. I wouldn’t want to put them in our garden hours advance though as we have lots of foxes and I suspect half of our would go missing.

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Preventing Sibling Squabbles

I always plan it so each of my children have the same number of treats bought for them, which means they need to find the same number of eggs. Obviously my eldest has always been the best at finding the eggs, but we remove the competitive element by making each colour plastic egg belong to a different child eg my son has green and orange ones, my middle daughter blue and yellow or a sticker on each egg to show who they are for. This means the siblings use team work to find their eggs, helping each other. There is no incentive for one person to push the others out of the way and grab all the eggs.

Pro tip: make sure you know how many eggs you have hidden so you can count them afterwards and ensure you have found them all. You don’t want to find long forgotten chocolate in the Summer.

Ready, Steady, Go

When the eggs are all hidden my children don their Easter Bonnets (the year's we have made them) or Rabbit ears, grab a basket and I send them off to find the eggs. If you don't have baskets then Easter bags like you can get for cheap in Home Bargains work well. We did this last year when we were away because they fold flat and took up less space in the car.

Enjoying the treats after the Easter Egg Hunt

Easter Egg Hunts and The Easter Bunny

The Easter bunny is a strange one for me. It wasn’t a thing when I was growing up and I didn’t introduce the idea to my children, however through nursery, school and TV they picked up on the idea and believed that the Easter Bunny brings Easter eggs. I neither deny or reinforce the idea that the Easter Bunny exists, but I have made it clear that I am the one hiding our eggs for our Easter Hunt. If you want to give the Easter bunny credit for providing the Easter gifts then you'll need a bigger distraction (or a giant rabbit suit) while you hide the eggs.

We use the same plastic eggs every year to hide treats in and messages

NOMO Free From Vegan Chocolate Easter (AD - Gifted)

Thank you to NOMO for sending a selection of this year's Easter range to include in this post. We have been buying NOMO eggs for years because my children and I love the chocolate, it's not as bitter as some free from eggs and not sickly sweet like some of the child targeted Free From eggs. I always buy my own Easter egg from NOMO each year.

This year's range is bigger than ever before with lots of different big eggs as well as filled bunny shapes (cookie dough and chocolate fudge) and a child targeted range.

NOMO chocolate is

- Vegan
- Dairy Free
- Gluten Free
- Egg Free
- Nut Free

You can buy NOMO direct on their website or from Ocado, Amazon, Tesco, Sainsburys, Waitrose, ASDA, Holland & Barrett and Goodibox