Easter, In Perspective

Holidays can be difficult when you are living frugal or you’re on a strict budget. Your spouse expects things, your kids expect things, and the commercial mentality of our culture feeds those expectations. Easter is coming up, and while it’s not nearly as expensive as Christmas, it still carries it’s own presumptions.

I try my best to keep my perspective about holidays. Being the mom in the house, I tend to set the tone for how festive we get. We love to celebrate so it’s easy to let things get out of hand. For Easter – well, we all need new Easter outfits and we also need to have an Easter basket full of goodies for our daughter when she wakes up, we really should do an Easter egg hunt and we absolutely cannot go without the traditional Ham dinner. Before you assume I’m suggesting you get rid of all that, let me tell you that we do almost all of those things in our home. However, we keep things in perspective in relation to our budget and the meaning of the holiday.

Like last year, Chloe is getting a homemade Easter dress. (It’s actually from the same pattern as last year too) Some day she may resent that, but she’s almost 4 and she still thinks I’m awesome – so I’m going with it. The dress is made entirely (with the exception of the zipper) of hand-me-down fabric, much of it from my dear grandmother that passed away in December. The dress is meaningful in more ways than one. And – Chloe adores it.

David and I have never bought new clothes for Easter (as adults). We just scrounge up whatever pastel articles of clothing we have and go with it. We’ve never really minded.

We keep the Easter basket thing pretty low-key. This year I’m going to sew her a matching purse to go with her dress (sorry, no picture, I haven’t gotten to it yet!). I plan to use the purse as her Easter basket. We’ll get her one or two treats and also the bunny I sewed for her (remember last year’s Kung-Fu bunny? I am really not brilliant at sewing animals. I’m thinking I should stick to clothes).

We always have a ham dinner for Easter but we usually eat it as a family at home. For quite a few years now we’ve had Easter dinner with my side of the family and we’ve each shared a little of the expense and preparation. I’m excited to have a chance to share it with my husband’s side of the family this year.

All of those things are fun and I look forward to them. I get all excited sewing Chloe’s dress. All those things – aren’t the focus though. The big deal for Easter in our family – and everything that day revolves around it – is that Jesus is alive. Much of our day is spent at our church and all the celebrating we do is in that context.

When holidays are celebrated for their meaning rather than for personal enjoyment alone it adds something wonderful to them and makes the other things seem more like an added bonus instead of the main event.

This is what my family does. How does your family celebrate Easter? Have you found any ways to tone down some of the commercialism and spend a little less?

~This post is linked in with Kingdom First Mom’s Easter Eggstravaganza~

Why I do what I do ~ I could be fueled for six months by the look on my daughter’s face the first time she tried on her dress and looked in the mirror. I sew her things, hoping for exactly that moment.

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Tagged as: Easter, Family Life, Frugal Living, Gifts, Sewing