Fun Easter Facts and Family Activities

No matter how old you are or where you are in the world, whether you’re religious or not, Easter is a fun family tradition that never gets old. From Easter egg hunts to photos with the Easter Bunny or taking your first bite into that chocolate bunny, Easter is a time filled with fun! This year your festivities may need to be adjusted as we stay home but there is still fun to be had. Perhaps you may even start new family traditions to continue for years to come. We hope you enjoy these fun Easter facts and family activities!

How much do you Peeps really know about Easter? Here are some fun facts about the holiday:

• 70% of Easter candy sold is chocolate
• Are you an ears, arms or tail person? 76% percent of people eat the ears on the chocolate bunny first, 5% go for the feet and 4% for the tail.
• The tallest Easter egg chocolate was made in Italy in 2011. It stood at over 34 feet tall and weighed almost 16,000 pounds!
• Americans buy more than 700 million marshmallow Peeps during Easter, making Peeps the most popular non-chocolate Easter candy.
• Americans consume more than 16 million jelly beans during Easter. That’s enough jelly beans to circle the globe not once, not twice, but three times!
• For some reason, red jelly beans are more popular than any other color.
• Next to Halloween, Easter is the biggest candy-consuming holiday of the year.
• The idea of the Easter bunny giving candies and eggs is said to have originated in Germany during the middle ages.
• The term Easter gets its name from Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess who symbolizes the hare and the egg.
• Old superstition has it that if you wore new clothes on Easter, you would have good luck for the rest of the year.
• The largest ever Easter egg hunt was held in Florida in 2007, where 9,753 children searched for 501,000 eggs!
• Some European countries feature other animals bringing eggs to children on Easter. The cuckoo brings the eggs in Switzerland while the fox does it in the Westphalia region of Germany.

Now for the fun part! Here are a few easy Easter activities to play with the family:

• Egg Commands – Write down several silly commands on a piece of paper. Cut them into strips and place each strip in a plastic egg. Close the eggs and put them in a basket. Each person takes a turn picking and performing a command from the basket! Command examples: Hop like a bunny, shake your bunny tail, carry an egg on a spoon across the room, name 3 types of easter candy or do 10 jumping bunny jacks
• Jelly Bean Race – Fill two baskets each with the same amount of jelly beans. Place them side-by-side on a table. Divide players into two even teams. Have the teams line up behind a starting point several feet away with an empty basket and a spoon. The players on each team must take turns racing to the table and placing as many jelly beans as they can on their spoons. They must then race back, dump their jelly beans into the empty basket and hand the spoon off to the next player. If a player drops any jelly beans they must go back and start over. First team to safely transfer all of their jelly beans wins!
• Blind Taste Test – Cut various easter treats in small pieces. Take turns blind folding one another and guessing what Easter treat is in your mouth.
• Bunny Pokey Dance – Perfect for little kids who love the hokey pokey! Turn the classic children’s song into the Bunny Pokey by replacing the traditional body parts with the following: Bunny Foot, Bunny Ears, Bunny Tail, Bunny Nose and of course, the whole Bunny self!
• Blind Bunny Draw – Give everyone a piece of paper and a pen. Blindfold them and ask then to draw, in order:
  1. A circle.
  2. Two bunny ears on the circle.
  3. A bunny’s nose in the circle.
  4. Bunny’s eyes in the circle.
  5. Bunny’s mouth and teeth.
  6. Bunny’s whiskers.
  7. Write your name below the bunny’s head.
  8. Players open their eyes and see if they were able to draw a bunny while blindfolded. The player that draws the best bunny then wins.

   

We hope everyone has a happy, healthy and safe Easter!