So I finally decided there was no way on earth I was ever going to get caught up on all of the Easter blogging I hoped to do, but it would be a shame not to document our Easter festivities at all.  Here’s a collection of photos from our egg-dying at Grandmom’s house on Easter Eve and egg hunting at Aunt Mary’s on Easter Sunday.

After all my fretting about losing sight of thr true meaning of Christmas a few months back, you’d think I’d have made a special effort to help the girls reflect on what is far and away, the more important holiday: Easter.   Somehow, amid visitors and juggling four girls, it just didn’t happen.  On Easter Sunday I was feeling discouraged that I had, by my silence, let the girls forget for this year that Easter isn’t all about bunnies and chocolate and eggs.  It isn’t just some metaphorical celebration of the new life that comes up all around us each spring.

And so, in a last ditch effort, the two big girls and I spent Resurrection Sunday (before the big egg hunt at Aunt Mary’s) trying to make Resurrection Cookies, as described in our church cookbook.  You can also find the recipe here, on a lovely site that I found by googling (I hope its author won’t mind a little linky love from a complete stranger…).  We also replaced the pecans with walnuts, and found that normal vinegar works just fine.

If  you are the kind of person who is already gathering ideas now for next Easter (which I, unfortunately, am not), I can thoroughly recommend that you follow the link and check this out.  The idea is that each ingredient and step of the process of making the cookies symbolizes a part of the story of Christ’s trial, death and resurrection, culminating in hollow meringue cookies symbolizing a glorious empty tomb.

I wanted to take pictures of the resulting cookies for you, but sadly, we hit a little roadblock in our quest for Resurrection Cookies.  I have no electric mixer.  My little handheld food processor, which I use mostly for pureeing my own baby food, seemed to be doing the trick ever so slowly, but then it got really hot and stopped working.  So I was left with only a tiny little whisk to get the job done with, and let me tell you, those stiff peaks are mighty elusive when you’re working with a tiny little whisk.  So, 45 minutes and *zero* stiff peaks later, I gave up and made our cookies out of slightly thick, gooey egg whites.  They were still yummy the next morning, but it took some persuading for the girls to see the “emptiness” of the tomb (“No, sweetie, you have to look behind the walnuts.”)

A few important lessons were learned:

• An electric mixer really is an essential if you want to make meringues.  ( I had one is Scotland, but it wouldn’t have plugged in here, so I gave it away when we moved.)  What I want to know is, how on earth did someone discover, back in the olden days, that egg whites ever form stiff peaks and turn into meringues?  I think I’d have to be really, really bored to want to beat egg whites by hand for the required 3 hours or so that it apparently takes, just for something to do.
• Watching someone beat eggs for 45 minutes is not that fun if you’re three, or even four and a half.  I released the girls after about ten minutes, and they popped back into the kitchen every few minutes to see if there was anything to be licked yet.  Sadly, no.
• But most importantly, my girls really do seem to have hearts for learning about the Lord, and this was such an encouragement to me.  This activity provided such a great platform for reminding them how Christ suffered for them, for me, for the world, and how He gloriously conquered death once and for all – hallelujah!

We will definitely do it again next year.  But, umm, with an electric mixer.