Celebrate: Easter Sunday

For mostly superficial reasons, I love Easter. Don't get me wrong: The spiritual significance of the holiday holds tremendous meaning to me, but it's one I try to reflect on and feel gratitude for throughout the year, as well as on Easter Sunday itself.
But is there any other holiday as dedicated to Pretty as Easter?
I love the celebration of spring with all its daffodils and tulips. I love all the pretty pastel colours and Easter dresses. Nick and I serve in the Nursery (kids between 18 months and 3 years, for those who might be wondering) at our church, and Easter Sunday was just make-you-melt adorable with all of the little girls in their finest.
Oh, and there's chocolate. Cadbury's Mini Eggs! Pretty pastelly m&m's! Cadbury's Creme Eggs! It's hard to argue with a holiday that encourages that much chocolaty goodness. Well... at least it is at our house. And I get to use my pretty Easter candy dish!


Seeing as I'm trying to make holidays more special, I started out our Easter Sunday celebrations by getting up early (-ish; it was the weekend after all) and making breakfast. We had freshly baked croissants, hard-boiled eggs and orange juice. And lest you be under the delusion that I am some sort of wonder woman, the croissants came in a tube and the orange juice out of a carton. But I did boil the eggs myself, thank you very much.
The most important part of Easter breakfast at my house growing up was always the table setting. In fact, if you're curious to see what I have to live up to, my mum just wrote about Easter on her blog and posted a photo of her lovely Easter table.
Well! Seeing as not everyone has (self) hand-painted Easter plates, Kindereggs and sunlight streaming onto their kitchen table, I did the best with what I had and this is what I came up with:


It looks a little forlorn in this photo, but it was quite nice in person, I promise! I started with a sage green table cloth and plain white plates topped with cloth napkins. And we used our fancy glasses for the orange juice. Nick had already bought me some beautiful purple tulips earlier in the week, so we didn't really need anything else for a center piece, but I wanted to display our Easter eggs, so I cut some branches from an obliging tree, and did this Norwegian style:


Lest you read my last post and start thinking that Norwegians are endlessly lopping branches off unsuspecting trees to use them as holiday center pieces, you are only partially right. You're really supposed to keep the branches from Fastelavn going until Easter, but that wasn't going to happen at our house. So I got some fresh branches, stuck them in a vase and decorated them with eggs that we decorated together the first year we were married.


In a fit of sheer adorableness, I had bought a special little decorative egg for Nick that I had cunningly planned to place in his egg cup in lieu of an actual, edible egg. Except, of course, that we didn't have any egg cups. Except, of course, that America as a nation has missed out entirely on the concept of egg cups being an essential part of Easter. Except, of course, the horribly lame novelty ones that Target had to offer. I looked and looked, but had to give up. Nick's egg seemed doomed to be without receptacle. Unless...

So I knitted one.

And that is frankly all I have to say about that particular aspect of our celebration.

Easter was a really nice, really relaxing day (apart from the two hours spent in the company of 21 under-three year olds). It was sunny enough to finally feel like spring, and the first daffodil of the season finally made an appearance in our flowerbed. I really enjoyed how good it felt to just be our little family spending some time together.