Written by Sarah Milano
Holiday traditions are part of what makes a holiday important to us. Going to an Easter service, eating a special meal and spending time with your family may be the basis of your yearly celebrations, but there is always room to create new Easter traditions. In this day and age, it is as important as ever to have an active lifestyle and create healthy traditions for your children to follow. So this Easter, switch things up and redefine your holiday traditions.
1. Take a Post-Dinner Walk
While allowing your dinner to settle before dessert is served, take a nice walk around the neighbourhood. A walk is beneficial in many ways: one, it helps your food to digest; two, it offers cardiovascular exercise; and three, it gives you quality time with your family. Since children should be getting an hour of exercise every day, this is a great way to meet that recommendation during a holiday.
2. Create an Easter Egg Scavenger Hunt
Easter egg hunts are a great deal of fun for children but it also gets them off of the couch and moving. If you never had an Easter egg hunt before, the premise is simple: hide various eggs, such as hardboiled eggs that have been dyed different colours or plastic eggs, around your yard and have your children search for them.
You can make it even more exciting by hiding coins or other little toys to be found as well. Give your children clues about where some of the eggs are hiding, and watch them run around, looking behind bushes and in the grass. If you want to give them an even better workout, time them or tell them whoever finds the most eggs in 5 minutes wins a prize.
3. Start an Annual Easter Game Challenge
What’s a better holiday tradition than creating a yearly challenge just for your family? Pick an outdoor activity that your family really enjoys such as playing a sport like touch football, basketball, soccer or even running and make it a competition. Really hype it up so your family can get excited about it. Introduce it as “The Smith Family’s First Annual Volleyball Challenge” or whatever competitive activity you think everyone would like best.
Once it’s over, your kids will be excited knowing that they can either try to beat you or beat you again next Easter. Not only will you be building family memories, but you will be creating healthy traditions.
4. Make Easter a Gadget Free Day
If you find that your family is constantly on their cellular phone, electronic device or video game system, declare Easter a gadget free zone. Being caught up with electronics keeps kids from being active and keeps parents from spending quality time with their kids. By nixing these devices for one day, your family can focus on spending time with each other and hopefully will get them off of the couch.
These four tips are guaranteed to add some physical activity into your Easter holiday and help you to create new, exciting traditions. After all, in 20 years your children won’t remember the video games they played that day but they will remember the great memories of the fun you created together.
