My family has two phrases that frequent our banter.  One is “…and that is why we don’t have nice things” and the other is “…AND you ruined Christmas.”

I am not very good at following traditions.  I like Christmas trees (real ones) but I do not like to get one, decorate it, or take it down.  I have never made my children believe that Santa or the Easter Bunny was anyone else but me.  (The tooth fairy is my husband’s domain and his version is not the twinkly, prompt, money tossing version, our fairy has a dark side.)  I have ruined the traditional holiday feasts starting years before they were born by choosing to be a vegetarian.  Ladling out the Christmas soup or slicing into the Thanksgiving vegetable lasagna lacks the fanfare of the traditional repast.  Despite these things family traditions have evolved.  Some not intentional, like the annual Christmas morning airing out of the house because the cinnamon buns I make for Christmas breakfast overflow into the bottom of the oven, creating great billows of smoke and causing the smoke detector to go off.  One year I remembered to put a cookie sheet under the pan to alleviate the overflow issue and I was chastised by my children for ruining a Christmas tradition.   Evidently, nothing says Christmas like a smoke haze and a screeching alarm.

That brings us to Easter.  We have never followed candy trails or had Easter egg hunts because we have always had a dog.  The balance between happy, over-sugared dog with crying children or happy, over-sugared children and indifferent dog lead me to start making treasure hunts.  As with most things, it started with my eldest.  When he was wee I would make clues with drawings leading him to his treasure.  Then he learned to read and the clues became words, words became sentences, and sentences evolved to really, really bad, mostly rhyming poetry.  One child became two, two became three, three became four.  This year is the first year all four get bad poetry clues.  What makes the bad poetry even worse is I have a tendency to do the composing late at night which leads to some interestingly random clues.

This is one of my son’s clues this year,

Obvious

Oblivious

Obnoxious

What do these words have to do with your next clue?

Nothing.

They were just fun to write.

(I did give a hint where to hunt next.)

I usually send them outside at least once in their hunt for clues as well, and believe it or not, they look forward to this every year.