Slow, Sustainable Easter Gifts for Kids
If you're looking for an alternative to the usual chocolate fest this Easter, we've gathered some lovely gift ideas. Not only are they better for the teeth, they don't come wrapped in swathes of unnecessary plastic and will feed their imaginations rather than their sugar-highs.
Magical fairy doors
These are such fun and add a lovely magical feel to your home. Simply buy a plain wooden dollhouse door and stick to the skirting board in an out-of-the-way part of your house. You can either give the door as a gift, and tell the child it's there to welcome fairies into the house, or pretend it's just miraculously appeared in place (this is what we did, and it caused great squeals of excitement). You can also fix the door to a tree in your garden if you'd rather keep the fairies outdoors.
Each day your children can leave little notes for the fairies. In return, stock up on tiny baskets and other miniature goodies, and leave some by the door for your children to discover in the morning. We found adorable little milk bottles, wellington boots, egg boxes, garden tools and all manner of delightful things. Here's ours all set up with ingredients for fairy pancakes.
A basket full of treats
Fill a linen basket with fun gifts like chalks, mini chocolate eggs, some sunflower seeds and an eye-spy book. These are great if you're travelling over Easter and need to keep small people happy on a long journey. For quiet travels include some word puzzles if your kids are reading, or some crafty activities like stickers, pipe cleaners to create monsters out of, or wool for making pom-poms.
Crazy Cascarones
These Mexican Easter treats are so much fun and make a great activity gift (if a little messy). Over the next few days when you use any eggs be sure to crack them at the top rather than in the middle. Once the inside has come out, rinse the shell out and leave to one side to dry. When you have a good collection of empty shells paint or dye them in a range of colours and patterns.
Fill the shells with recycled confetti and then squeeze a line of glue around the edge of the shell top. Cover with a square of tissue paper and press onto the glue, to create a kind of lid.
Then simply turn the eggs lid-side down and crack over someone's head! If you have very small kids you might want to break the eggs in the air over their heads instead in case they get scared. You could combine this part with a game in which the loser of each round gets an egg cracked over them, or let the youngest children crack eggs on all the big folk.
Modelling Dough
Had enough of the slime craze? Fed up with finding sticky blobs in strange places around the house? Us too. Despite banishing all slime-making activities to the garden shed it still seems to be everywhere. As a Springtime holiday gift we love the look of this modelling dough: it offers the same scope for creativity and playfulness, but without the yuk.
It's the texture of sand but with the cohesiveness of playdoh, so your kids can stretch, mould, roll, pull and pour it. And the best thing is that it only sticks to itself, not to surfaces, small hands or you.
Do you have any non-toxic, non-candy gifts that you like to give at this time of year?
