Monday, March 19, 2007

The Popularity of Easter Plays

Easter is one of those times of years that many children are involved in plays. Whether for church or for school or for some other extracurricular activity, many children’s plays end up falling on or near Easter. Usually, religious Easter plays depict some aspect of the Easter story, such as the discovery of Jesus by Mary Magdalene. There are many ways your child can get involved with an Easter play, religiously themed or otherwise. It’s a great experience for a child to be involved with a play, and stick it out through the line memorization and all.

The main venue for Easter plays is with your church. If your child goes to a Sunday school class, you should enquire about their plays, and see if there will be anything going on during the Easter holiday. Church Easter plays generally depict some part of the Easter story. They are often musicals as well, alternating between singing parts and regular acting. This will usually require a commitment not only on the part of the child, but also from you. You will have to take your child to practice regularly, and probably attend a few dress rehearsals.

The production itself will usually be a fairly big deal, and may even occur during the church service on Easter Sunday. The children will have to get up in front of all the adults, and deliver their lines. It may be intimidating for the children, but will hopefully teach them how to be confident in front of adults, which is a skill that will benefit them forever. Usually no Easter play is complete without some sort of embarrassing mishap. Some poor kid will forget his lines, or some girl will trip on her costume and bite the dust on the stage. If this happens to your child, you should stress that there is no reason to be embarrassed.

Overall, practicing for and performing an Easter play is a good experience not only for the children involved, but also for the adults that assist in putting it on. Lots of practice goes into them, it will be good for your child to stick with a project until it is over with. So find out about the Easter play projects offered by your church, and try to get your child involved. If he or she isn’t in to the concept, you should keep bringing it up and be fairly adamant about it.

Easter Egg Hunts: A Memorable Easter Pastime For Kids

Easter egg hunts have become an integral part of Easter in American culture. While deviating from the religious aspects of the holiday, they manage to entrance kids by giving them a fun activity. In an Easter egg hunt, many eggs are hidden around a large outdoor area. A group of children is released into the area, and they find as many eggs as possible. Sometimes they are real eggs, but many times they are also plastic eggs with candy on the inside. The Easter egg hunts are usually meant for smaller children in the toddler range. If you want to hold an Easter egg hunt, you can easily set it up.

Easter egg hunts can vary greatly in their scale. It is possible to have a hunt involving literally hundreds of kids, or just a few of your own. You will have to buy the eggs accordingly. Decide how many you want each kid to have, then multiply that number by the number of kids. You can buy eggs that are bright colored, hold candy, or will blend in with wherever you choose to hide them. Before the hunt, you will make sure that none of the kids are watching, and hide the eggs in various locations around the premise. It is possible to have an Easter egg hunt outdoors or indoors.

Your hiding techniques will depend on the age range that you are catering to. If you are putting on the egg hunt for the enjoyment of a bunch of toddlers, then you will probably want to stick with easier locations. For any kids older than 4 or 5, you can start to hide the eggs in places that take a little more thought to find. It can be hard to decide what to do when you have kids of different ages. The best thing to do is to get a few different colors of eggs, and adjust the difficulty levels accordingly. Tell the older kids beforehand that they are only supposed to hunt for the eggs with the difficult color.

Easter egg hunts are a fun experience for the entire family. It gives the kids a chance to run around frantically in search of candy-filled orbs, and will create many fun memories for the children.

Easter Dress to Celebrate the Occasion

Easter is a very special occasion for many people, and usually it is standard for attendees of Easter services to dress up particularly nice for the occasion. This usually means a tuxedo for men, and a nice Easter dress for women. Easter dresses are usually very colorful and nice, and can be picked out a couple weeks in advance, or used again from a previous year. If you would like to find an Easter dress for yourself or someone you know, there are several places you can look for a nice unique dress that will fit you well.

First, you can look at local thrift stores or pawn shops. This may seem like it wouldn’t be a very classy place to look, but on the contrary you can find some of the most beautiful antique dresses at a price that is practically a steal. Most thrift stores have changing rooms that will allow you to try the dress on before you buy it, and see whether it is a good fit for you or not. So before you try anything else, definitely give the local thrift stores a quick browse.

If you don’t find anything that you like at the thrift store, you should try looking online for a dress. Sites like eBay sell all sorts of things in the clothes department. You can find Easter dresses of every style imaginable, and most of them are for an extremely good price. The only downside to buying it online is that you will have no way to check whether it fits properly on you or not. So if you feel you The only downside to buying it online is that you will have no way to check whether it fits properly on you or not. So if you feel you need to look online for a dress, be sure to know the exact size and measurements that fit you best.

Ultimately, you will be almost sure to find a satisfactory Easter dress if you just search around enough. The process of finding it may not be easy, but if you just look in enough place then you will surely be able to find something that will work. From thrift stores to online auction sites, there are many options for Easter dress purchasing that will save you time and money if you just know what kind of dress you are looking for.

Should You be Attending Church Services Only on Easter

hould You be Attending Church Services Only on Easter

It is common for churches to see a spike in attendance on both Easter and Christmas. These two holidays seem to draw people to churches, seemingly to soak up the church service for long enough to last until the next major holiday. If you are one of those people, many church officials believe that you should rethink your ways. Ultimately it is up to you whether you want to change your ways, but after you see the arguments that church officials are making, you may decide that it is a better choice to go to church every Sunday rather than just a few days of the year.

Most people who attend these services do it as a sort of way to remind themselves what church is like, and affirm their own reasons for not going. They may get a bad vibe from the Easter service, and decide that they are correct in not attending church on a regular basis. If you have this outlook, then you should definitely rethink your logic. Church services on the days of Easter and Christmas are definitely not representative of regular church services. If you get the feeling that they are just like a large production put on for the benefit of the viewers, then this is probably much more accurate. Churches put a lot of effort into making great Easter services, and to some people this is a deterrent.

Lots of people also attend Easter or Christmas services at the invitation of a friend or neighbor, and get a bad vibe from the church. This is another way that people can get a feel for the church that is not very accurate. If the only church services you have been to have been on holidays, you don’t have an idea for what church is really about. And by only going to the church that you were invited to, you have limited the scope of what you can experience. So even if it is just for a few weeks in a row outside of Easter and Christmas, you should consider attending the church services of several different churches. You can get a feel for the many different styles that are out there, and see if it is something that you would like to do every week.

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Easter: The Meaning, the Traditions, and the Secular Views

Easter is the Christian holiday meant to celebrate the resurrection of the religious figure Jesus Christ. According to the Christian Bible, Jesus was slain on the cross on the previous Friday (known as Good Friday). After lying in the grave for 3 days, it is said that he was given new life and left the grave on Sunday. Therefore, Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after a vernal equinox in March, which is believed to be around the same time of year that Jesus was killed and resurrected. While the holiday is religious at its roots, it has been warped by secular culture, and has many strange traditions attached to it today.

Since Easter has become more and more of a holiday which is equally celebrated by the secular world, it has also had some other non-religious traditions attached to it. The first is the Easter bunny. He is sort of like the Santa Claus of the Easter holiday. When children wake up on the morning of Easter, they are usually given a large basket of candy by their parents. This is supposed to have come from the Easter bunny, a benevolent rodent with a stash of candy that rivals the largest of grocery stores.

There are also many activities that children can look forward to during the Easter holiday. Lots of parents decide to put on Easter egg hunts, during which hundreds of eggs (plastic or otherwise) are hidden, and usually contain candy. There are many community Easter egg hunts that go on each year, meant for different age groups. Parents who put on Easter egg hunts for their own children usually hide them around the house or around the yard while the children are sleeping, then encourage a through search once everyone has awoken.

Easter is one of those times of years that many people attend church services in the morning. Like Christmastime, Easter seems to bring many non-religious people to the morning services. The holiday is largely religious, and it seems as if this feeling rubs off. If you want to attend a church service on the morning of Easter, you should talk to some of your friends or neighbors who you know attend church. They will be more than happy to bring you along for the day, and you may find that it is something you enjoy.