breathing deep where the air is thin: Easter, continued

I have a bunch of catching up to do.

Again.

While Easter is a week and a half away, I still wanted to share what we did on Easter morning... especially since some of it was a continuation of Good Friday's activities.

The first thing we did was make "resurrection rolls".

Perhaps for some of you, these are old hat, but they were a new thing to me.

Before I came up with the cross idea that we did on Good Friday, I looked around the World Wide Web to see if I could get any good ideas. I didn't find much that I wanted to do, but I did find this recipe and object lesson many different places.

It was great fun, really simple and a rather tasty treat to boot.

Ingredients:

tube of crescent rolls

(none of that easiness to be found here, so I made my own)

large marshmallows

melted butter

brown sugar mixed with cinnamon

Once you have made your dough (or bought it!), roll it out and cut it into pieces - I'd say about 4 inches square is plenty. If it is from a tube - just use the triangles.

Tell the kids that the marshmallow represents Jesus' body.

Back in those days, when someone died, they would put oil and spices on the bodies and then would wrap them in cloth.

The butter represents the oil, the sugar and spices represent the spices and the dough is the cloth.

So you put the marshmallow into the butter, then roll it is the sugar and spice....

...and finally wrap it up with the dough.

Seal them very well otherwise they will leak.

Then they go in the over, which represents the tomb.

While we waited the "three days" (15-10 minutes at 350), we continued with our cross activity.

We went back to the cross that we put in the fire place.

We talked again about how Christ died to remove our sins.

To illustrate that, we burned the papers on which we wrote our sins, that we put on the cross.

(note to self - and you, if you ever do this.... the folded ones don't do very well - so don't fold them!)

I neglected to take a picture of this part, but I showed the kids how even though the "sins" were gone, they left a mark. The place where they were could be seen by the darker burn spots on the cross.

We talked about how even though Christ completely removes and forgives our sins, that doesn't mean we can keep sinning.... thinking "Well, even if I do this, Jesus will just forgive me."

Sin will always leave a mark.

We need to live our lives that won't leave these black marks.

After we prayed together, it was time to "go to the tomb", so to speak.

Or.... get the buns out of the oven.

Once cooled for a few minutes, each kid got a bun.

I took one and split it open - NO MARSHMALLOW!

Just like when the women went back to the tomb on the third day, Easter morning, the cloths were still there, but Jesus wasn't!

He left the tomb and the cloth that bound him.

He had risen from the dead!

The kids were quite enthralled with both the lesson and the yumminess of the rolls.

A great lesson and a delicious Easter breakfast!

After church, we had our not-quite-as-traditional-as-usual Easter hunt.

We didn't have baskets (meant to make some with the kids - ran out of time....) and some of the other usuals, but Eric did bring some Trader Joe's treats back from his trip to the US.

I wrapped them in color paper: