Eco-Friendly Easter Egg Hunt

Even in these days of conspicuous consumption, it's not hard to lighten your EEI (Easter Egg Impact) on Mother Earth. Forego those chintzy, overpriced, pre-filled baskets from the grocery store - where's the fun in those?

Create childhood memories for your kids by using the same special basket each year (I still have mine!) If you need to buy one, search the local resale shops - you can get excellent baskets for a fraction of the cost, and be supporting a charity as well. If you don't like the color, or it's getting dirty, use up some of that spray paint you have sitting around to give it a fresh new look. If you're really ambitious, make your own from that tangle of grape vines in the garden.

Next, you need grass for the basket. Earth friendly options include shredded paper, excelsior (wood wool), and even real grass. If you must use the plastic grass, find some at the resale shop, and save it to reuse from year to year.

Easter Eggs! Yay! It's easy and fun to dye eggs with natural ingredients. You can boil the eggs with the coloring agent, or soak hard-boiled eggs overnight to color them. Drawing a design with a wax crayon before coloring will yield an interesting result. For a "Mother Nature" look, try gluing small leaves and flower petals on the dyed eggs.

To get red or pink, try cranberry juice, beets, or raspberries.

To get orange eggs, use yellow onion skins.

Saffron or tumeric will produce yellow eggs.

Blueberries or red cabbage will make blue eggs.

For purple eggs, use red wine.

Spinach should yield a green egg.

For brown eggs, buy brown eggs, or use coffee or tea.

But you say you prefer to use the plastic eggs to hide trinkets and candies? Again, hit the resale shops and hang on to them for next year. As for the trinkets, think before you buy something cheaply made that will be in the trash next week. Use your imagination - one year, the Easter Bunny filled many of the eggs with jigsaw puzzle pieces. The kids spent the afternoon putting the puzzle together (and eating the candy that was in the rest of the eggs...)