A few years ago, at a secondhand store near my home in Charleston, South Carolina, I found a handful of brightly painted wooden ornaments shaped like eggs, bunnies, and teeny birdhouses. The treasures transported me right back to a childhood scene I hadn’t thought about in years: From our Missouri backyard, my mom would haul in an armful of yellow flowering forsythia branches and arrange them into a centerpiece, dangling small eggs and decorations on them as a sort of springtime take on a Christmas tree. I asked a few friends and G&G contributors if their families ever decorated an Easter tree, whether indoors or out, and was flooded with some joyful stories:
“I grew up in Laurel, Mississippi, and I had completely forgotten about Easter trees until you just asked me this. Now I need one immediately. We had this delicate little tree with the daintiest ornaments hanging from it. Everything about Easter decorations felt so fragile compared to Christmas. Like they were things you were absolutely not supposed to touch. But my Grandma ’Nette was the kind of grandma who wanted us to enjoy the moment, so she’d sit right down with us and play with it. That’s one of those memories I didn’t even know I was still carrying around. I don’t keep an Easter tree now, but that’s about to change.” —Landon Bryant, of the Instagram account @landontalks
“I’m not sure whether my mother’s years living in Charleston, South Carolina, planted the seed, but growing up, we were the only family in our Central Washington town with an Easter tree. Each spring she would festoon the dogwood in our front yard with plastic eggs hung on colorful yarn, turning its pink blossoms into something even more celebratory (if also just a tad tacky).” —Kinsey Gidick, contributor
“I grew up in Decatur, Alabama, in the 1990s. My mom always allowed us to help adorn the trees in our front yard with pastel-colored plastic eggs tied with colorful ribbon. But we lived about three minutes up the street from my grandparents, and my Nonnie always had an Easter tree, usually indoors, made out of branches she’d assembled into a large glass planter on her dining room table and stuffed with Easter grasses. We hung hand-painted wooden carrots, pastel eggs, and porcelain Easter bunnies all around.
When I had children of my own, she sent me a box of Easter tree ornaments. The eggs were so deliciously decorated—wooden eggs, painted to look sugary and trimmed in a thick layer of pink “icing” around the outside—that my daughter Rosie tried one. We now hang an egg every year with the distinctive bite marks of a two-year-old imprinted in the shell.” —Mary Catherine McAnnally Scott, contributor
G&G contributing editor John T. Edge shared this photo of a stack of dishes his mother arranged into a sort of tree-like tower, studded with Easter eggs. “My mother and I posed in the back hall of our home in Clinton, Georgia, after singing ‘Up from the Grave He Arose’ at sunrise services,” Edge describes. “I remember the candles most of all, shaped like bunnies and eggs, chickadees and flowers. Lunch will soon follow, and with it glazed ham. And pear and lettuce salad, bulls-eyed with mayo and confetti-ed with cheddar.”
“For the past forty years, the centerpiece of my mom’s Easter table in Atlanta has been a twiggy little tree—kind of like a bonsai with no foliage—decorated with tiny wooden eggs and bird nests. The base is a basket in which a pair of felt bunnies, perfectly sized to fit an adoring child’s palm, nestle among styrofoam eggs wrapped in pastel thread. Never underestimate the staying power of an impulse craft-store purchase.” —Elizabeth Florio, senior digital editor
In Burlington, North Carolina, my mom (and whoever was around to help, out of five kids) would decorate the trees in our front yard with the classic plastic colored eggs hanging from various types of ribbon. She still carries on the tradition, and we still pose in front of the trees when we go home for Easter, now with our own children (there are ten grandchildren). The bags of eggs and ribbon live in the attic, and we reuse them every year, even though they have faded from well over thirty years of love. In Charleston, South Carolina, I keep up the tradition with a little Easter “tree” that’s a standard Limelight hydrangea in our backyard. I use the same plastic-egg-and-ribbon combo but with wider ribbons of different types and colors. My mom sent me a note about maintenance that I’d never considered: Taking the eggs off the trees is usually more of a challenge than putting them on. In North Carolina, depending on when Easter falls, the eggs are sometimes put on the trees before the leaves have come out. By the time they are taken down, spring has sprung and the leaves are out, making it much harder to find them all and take them down. It’s a bonus Easter egg hunt. —Gret Mackintosh, artist
CJ Lotz Diego is Garden & Gun’s senior editor. A staffer since 2013, she wrote G&G’s bestselling Bless Your Heart trivia game, edits the Due South travel section, and covers gardens, books, and art. Originally from Eureka, Missouri, she graduated from Indiana University and now lives in Charleston, South Carolina, where she tends a downtown pocket garden with her florist husband, Max.
