At our house, one of our favorite Easter traditions isn’t coloring Easter eggs or going on Easter egg hunts or even all of the candy we get (even though we do love all of those things)…our favorite tradition is what we call “the string thing”! So what exactly is the “string thing”? Well many years ago I had a friend introduce it to me, telling me that it was one of their favorite family traditions...and since then it has become one of ours too! It’s really kind of simple. It involves a whole roll of kite string and an Easter basket for each child and takes a little work, but the kids love it. What I do is tie the end of the kite string onto the basket, hide it in a good hiding place somewhere in the house (we’ve done it outside too) and then I take the roll of string and unwind it as I string it in and out of furniture, over and under things, through and around whatever I can find and then when I get to the end of the kite string, I tie the end of the string to the spool and then sit it down and try to remember which child it belongs to...and where it’s at after I do the same thing for everyone else! In the past, I’ve tried to make the spools all end at about the same place, but that’s not always easy to do!
By the time I get done doing that for 2 or 3 or 4 kids, it’s nearly impossible to make your way through the main part of the house! Rod doesn’t really like it because he gets stuck in his bedroom, unless he wants to crawl and climb through all of the string, and that just frustrates him, so he usually just stays in his room. That’s not always easy though because the kids are usually hanging out with him while they wait for me to get things ready...and they’re bouncing off the walls so it’s hard to be with them for very long!
This year before I hid anything or did any of our Easter activities, I waited until we heard from Jon and Brittney. I knew they probably weren’t going to join us for dinner because they already had plans with Brittney’s family, but it had sounded like they were going to come over for a few minutes before that and I wanted to wait to see what their plans were and sure enough, as soon as their church got out, they came by. I wasn’t sure if they would want to do anything or if they would just want me to give them their baskets...but they were good sports and said that they would do the “string thing” with us since Brittney had never done it before! I even coerced Jon and Brittney into hiding all of the candy filled Easter eggs out in the back yard because the kids usually go on an Easter hunt for their candy after they’ve found their baskets!
While Jon and Brittney were busy outside, the boys were in their room with the door closed and I was hurrying to get the baskets hid and the string all strung throughout the house. I even got Jon to help me a little. Then everything went awry! I was just about done with my last string, and I heard Brittney, who was sitting in the living room say “Hello President Reed!” as she looked out towards the front door! I stopped dead in my tracks! Was she just kidding or was he really at the front door? And why would he be at our front door on Easter Sunday? I didn’t have to question for long because as soon as she said Hello, I heard President Reed’s voice and I knew she wasn’t kidding. I immediately wanted to go into stealth mode and crawl away and hide (because that would have been the only way to get out of there at that point!), but I obviously couldn’t just leave, so I made my way out to the front door to greet President Reed myself. I almost laughed when I saw him standing at the front door surrounded by strings going every direction, but I knew that wouldn’t have been so smart! Instead, I could see that he had come to visit, so I did my best to hold the strings up and push some of them down so he could make his way into the living room. It wasn’t easy!
He had come to visit Rod about some church stuff and I wasn’t sure if I should make myself scarce or stick around. I kind of hoped he didn’t mind us all sticking around because Jon and Brittney were pretty much trapped on the couch. Needless to say, we had our visit but it was a very uncomfortable visit because President Reed couldn’t sit back and relax since he was completely surrounded by string! To top it all off, I could hear the boys in their room hollering, “can we come out yet?” I’m sure President Reed was wondering what in the world we were doing. I tried to explain but suddenly our fun little family tradition seemed like more of a nuisance than anything! I think I would have cut all of the strings just to get rid of them if I could have, but it would have just made a bigger mess of my string and I wasn’t sure it was worth that!
When President Reed got ready to leave, he volunteered to go out the back sliding door because it looked much easier to get out there than to climb back through the string to get to the front door. Somehow I just knew that Rod was going to be unhappy with me as soon as President Reed left, but guess what? He just said that it was OK and not to worry about it!
Once we finally got around to actually doing our Easter festivities, everything seemed OK again, but for a few minutes, I thought we might just have to give up on tradition and settle for something much simpler…like just handing over the Easter baskets already full of candy! But honestly, how much fun would that have been?
