An egg-cellent Easter Hunt idea
Gosh, time flies!
2025 feels like it’s just begun yet we’re already deep into April. Summer seems like a hazy memory, these autumnal days dip and darken by 6pm and term two looms just around the corner.
Time whizzes by in a broader sense too… my kids were once tiny and now they’ve grown. How short and special childhood seems.
My darling kids are too old now for our family’s traditional Easter Egg Hunt. We still get together, along with their cousins, at my sister’s rambling house on a rural block in central Victoria. That part of the state glows in Autumn, bright with russet leaves and misty with the whiff of open fires. We enjoy two days of catching up and meals together, bush strolls and music jams, and a visit through the meandering Daylesford trash and treasure market.
When they were younger the highlight of Easter for my kids was my sister Marcia’s famous egg hunt. Aunty Marcie is an Easter legend! Each year she set up for them the most fabulous cryptic egg hunt with dozens of corny rhyming clues (peppered with family jokes) each handwritten on strips of paper. While kids slept she hid each clue, along with a couple of eggs, in a series of linked locations. In this way she created a trail that wound throughout the house and yard.
On the Sunday morning our kids would wake bursting to set off and follow the clues, which led them through the trail, gathering eggs along the way for their baskets. They adored it, and it became a family tradition that kept cousins delighted and busy together as a team.
In 2020, while we were all mid-lockdown, my kids spent their first ever Easter at home (along with the rest of Victoria). It was then that I wrote up an edited version of Marcia’s egg hunt to share on this blog. Using the essence and structure of her hunt I created generic clues that can be easily replicated in your own home kitchen, a bedroom and a bathroom. They’re included on the pages below, along with detailed instructions on how to set up the whole shebang.
The ideal way to use this with your own family is to print out the following pages (they’re embedded as images), follow the instructions, then cut up the page and hide the separate clues around the house as specified. Accompany each with a treat (healthy or otherwise!) if you wish.
If you don’t have access to a printer you could try handwriting the clues. You might even have to get creative and access them on your device while telling the kids they arrived in an email from the Easter Bunny. Or you could get even more creative and write your own treasure hunt, Easter-themed or otherwise.
The beauty of this activity is not the chocolate - it’s the teamwork, the problem-solving and the surprise. Big kids help little kids, readers extend themselves, funny silly riddles are solved. Weaving those elements into any activity creates its own kind of magic.
Wishing you happy holidays, and egg-cellent hunting.
