Tag Archives: Egg Hunts

Easter Egg Hunt

Nationality: American
Age: 53
Occupation: Systems Analysts
Residence: Alhambra, California
Performance Date: 4/03/15
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

My informant for this piece is my aunt, who performed the easter egg hunt when she came over for Easter. During my childhood, my family used to hold easter egg hunts, although we have since stopped the practice. This easter however, she made an attempt to resume this tradition. 

Informant/Description of event:

During my childood, my family would hide plastic easter eggs in the backyard and I would attempt to find them. However, as my sister and I grew up, we no longer practiced this tradition. I remember that usually my parents would place coins or candy in the eggs. Sometimes there were special eggs that would have larger amounts of money or maybe a few more candy.

This year, my Aunt decided to attempt to revive this tradition by staging an Easter Egg hunt for us. She hid some plastic eggs in our living room, and told us to attempt to look for them.  These eggs also had some coins in them, as well as small candies. When we had found the eggs, she hid them again, although this time it was easier for us to find them due to us knowing the hiding spaces. My aunt also attempted variation in this ritual by hiding items such as small boxes during the easter egg hunt which were filled similarly to the eggs.

My Analysis:

I believe that the context of this was an attempt to revive an old family tradition that my family no longer practiced now that we had grown out of it. My takeaway is that this easter egg hunt also attempted to evoke feelings of closeness and togetherness that evolved out of previous iterations of this familial tradition.As a childhood ritual it did bring back memories of my childhood, and I guess reminded me of this ritual that I no longer do, and probably will not repeat next year.

Easter Egg Hunts

Nationality: European, Lebanese
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Brea, California
Performance Date: 6 April 2012
Primary Language: English

Easter egg hunts have long been a family tradition for this informant. Every year, her parents will hide eggs for her and they will also paint eggs the night before. In the Easter eggs, they will hide candy or small toys. Of course, now that she is older it is more of a fun tradition they keep. However, when she was younger, her and her sister always had huge Easter egg hunts.

This year, a few days before Easter, this informant, me and many more of our friends went around campus at midnight at we hid a total of 1,000 filled Easter eggs in random places. After getting our bags of Easter eggs, we became the Easter bunnies and hid the eggs all around the school campus. We did not tell anyone we were doing so, but the next day, we found out that it was a great success and many people found the candy-filled eggs with delight!

When I was younger, my parents would hide eggs all around our backyard as well and then as we got older, we started going to the city-wide Easter egg hunts at Chase Palm Park in Santa Barbara. There kids from all over the town raced to get as many eggs as possible, some eggs would have candy, some eggs would have tickets to redeem for prizes. I always loved this and we would go with all our friends. The golden eggs in each arena would have extra big prizes too.

Easter has always been a time of traditions, as is any holiday. And easter egg hunts have been a tradition for many both in childhood and then in adulthood. I believe that many childhood traditions stay because when we all grow up and have kids, we then pass our childhood traditions to our kids, so in a way, we never stop hunting for eggs or trick or treating.