When I was a kid, my brothers and I would have pretty mellow Easter egg hunts in the back yard. Dyed eggs and little chocolate eggs. Took about 2 minutes. No issues.

My wife on the other hand grew up on a farm and all the cousins would show up on Easter for the Big Hunt. 14 kids. Each family would root for their kids. They made little league moms look like saints. Screaming and yelling and following their kids.

"You better not let your cousins get more eggs than you or no dinner tonight!!"

Then they'd all go count the eggs and the money in the eggs; yes money! Then bragging rights were established for not only the day, but also the rest of the year.

Kids were in tears. Parents were embarrassed. Just an awful day on what was supposed to be a beautiful day. I think some of them are still in therapy.

/floridaman

That sounds stupid

Don't forget the part about the grand prize egg that was hidden in the coyote trap.

When I was a kid I heard my aunt thank my older cousin for helping put out Easter eggs. Devastating. But then next year I woke up in the middle of the night and just so happen to see a bunny hopping through the damn yard. My mind was all kinds of messed up for a while.

Our family would have a specific color egg for each of us to find. My mom reminded me today that one year I snooped our my brother's eggs and replaced the jelly beans with wheat Chex.

Cousin in law picked up a white Easter egg and thought it was edible. Put it in his mouth and it was a spider egg sac. Baby spiders started crawling around his mouth.

Commercial Easter sucks.

ATX_AG_08 said:

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When I was a kid I heard my aunt thank my older cousin for helping put out Easter eggs. Devastating. But then next year I woke up in the middle of the night and just so happen to see a bunny hopping through the damn yard. My mind was all kinds of messed up for a while.

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I didn't know anyone grew up really believing in the Easter Bunny like Santa or something. As kids, we died & decorated real hard boiled eggs the night before, then mom would make deviled eggs or egg salad after the hunt.

The plastic eggs w/ coins and candy inside came along at some point in my elementary school years, but we still died real eggs.

My bedroom window faced the back yard, and one Easter morning I busted my Dad hiding eggs around daybreak. When I brought it to his attention, he told me that the Easter Bunny had hidden the eggs in really easy places and he just wanted to make it a challenge for me and for my sister. I thought that was a pretty good effort, but I wasn't buying it. Maybe that's because I was 16.

When I was a kid, we dyed hardboiled eggs and left them for the Easter bunny to hide. Dad would always keep count of how many he hid versus how many we found. One year, his count was off and the "extra" egg was really well hidden (tucked down inside an old hollow post in our garden fence). A week or so later, there was a horrible smell coming from the garden. Once we finally tracked down the smell, we got to watch dad try and fish a rotten egg out of a small hole in the post.

Later in life, my brother was in the Corps and several of his buddies lived too far away to go home for Easter, so my parents would host a bunch of kids for Easter lunch. They would hide eggs filled with cash (I think there was one golden one with $100 in it) around the backyard and let my brother and his friends hunt them. It was always pretty competitive and probably more fun to watch full contact egg hunting than to participate.

The Easter Bunny is just another step in not believing in Santa Claus…

We have a big egg hunt on a farm. Besides the normal eggs each kid has their prize egg with their name on it. Popular hiding spots are under dried cow patties, in the rafters of the barn, on top of the windmill, literally in a haystack. This year I tried to think of something that hadn't been done before so I put a rock in a prize egg and sank it into a shallow part of the pond. About 4" underwater but easily visible. I even told him it was within 10' of the edge of the pond but took him a while to realize that could mean into the pond as well.

We don't actually put the candy/money in the eggs anymore. They have to redeem them, that way nothing gets left in the field and the chocolate doesn't melt or get soaked in pond water/cow patties.