Sharpie-Decorated Easter Eggs (plus they're raw)

and a few other simple, egg-related ideas

Happy Friday! Raise your hand if you like the bonding and creativity that goes with Easter egg decorating, but you could do without the stinky vinegar baths and, like, the effort of the whole endeavor in general 😅 My hand is raised.

Another issue I have, especially with five kids: it feels wasteful to hard-boil a ton of eggs to decorate and then to just…let them rot. Recently, however, I saw a game-changing article from the NYT titled “You Don’t Actually Have to Hard-Boil Your Easter Eggs.” Whaaaaat?

You can store them in the fridge after you decorate them and put them back after you look at them or show them off. This way you can still cook with them! Whether it’s making quiches or Sir Ian McKellen’s Scrambled Eggs or homemade pasta or frozen burritos…eggs are one of the cheapest, most nutrient-dense sources of protein you can get!

So here’s a simple activity idea: give your kids Sharpies + eggs straight from the carton. Boom, your activity is ready. (Paper towels also help because of smudging.)

Here are some favorite designs from what my kids and I made:

• Scenes from nature, such as a waterfall or a field of wildflowers

• Silly faces

  

• A love letter written in cursive (you could also do song lyrics) and pretty flowers drawn over smudged Sharpie

• Toddler scribbles, stick figures stacked on top of each other (like in a water ski show), and—get this—a depiction of mankind’s historical progress. My 9-year-old drew herself with a dinosaur, then in a cave in the ice age, then in a burgeoning city in the industrial revolution. Time moves forward as you rotate the egg 😅

If you have the patience and skill to take egg decorating more seriously, you might look into the Ukranian egg-decorating tradition pysanky. See, for example, Elissa Brodt’s annual #easterbrodt posts; her decorated eggs are not only gorgeous but they tell a story. With pysanky, the symbols and even colors that are used on eggs often carry a rich meaning. I can’t fathom that level of dedication and artistry 🤯

But I like our quirky method and designs, too. If egg-decorating is a tradition that’s important to you, I hope you have a lot of fun together…however you do it.

A Few Ideas from Last Year

Last year I shared about making paper eggs and tying them to little branches!

I also shared a printable for a nature scavenger hunt where you store all the found goodies in an egg carton.

And lastly—my personal favorite—my kids and I had a lot of fun making and peeling frozen egg marbles.

You can read full instructions on last year’s post here.

I’d love to hear about your favorite egg-decorating techniques! The Sharpies were a huge hit with my kids and we’ll probably do this again and again.

Have a great weekend! You’re doing a great job ❤️

Warmly,

Hope from Family Scripts

P.S. Apologies to readers with egg allergies who cannot participate in this week’s activities. 😬