For Good Friday breakfast, we either made chocolate crosses, (biscuits made with  cocoa and sugar, and cut in the shape of crosses), or hot cross buns. This was never a big deal, just one of the ways I tried to make Easter a bigger celebration than simply having an Easter egg hunt on Saturday, and Sunrise service on Sunday. Yet this small part of our Easter celebration is one of the things they miss when they are off at college--it just doesn’t feel like Easter without them. (See recipes below)

 

 

Then in the evening after dinner, we had a solemn ceremony when we put a rough cross on the floor. Then each of us wrote our own sins on a piece of paper, then folded the paper and nailed it to the cross. When the children were too young to be able to write their own, they dictated to us, and we wrote it for them. Then we would pray a prayer of thanksgiving for the forgiveness that we had received through Jesus death on the cross. Then we took the papers off the cross and burn them to symbolize how our sins have been forgiven and are no longer held against us.

Hint: If you do this, be sure to burn the paper outside, or if you do it inside, make sure to do it our of range of smoke detectors, and that the container has a trivet under it. The first time we tried this, I used a stainless steel bowl, but it still made a burn mark on the carpet.