How to Set up Baby’s First Easter Egg Hunt

If there’s a new baby in the family, Easter suddenly feels a bit more magical, and probably a bit more chaotic too. A first Easter egg hunt is one of those small milestones that ends up in the family photo album forever, even though your baby has no idea what’s going on yet. That’s fine. It’s as much for you as it is for them.

Here’s how the tradition started, and then a proper, practical guide to setting one up for a baby who can’t yet walk, talk, or understand the concept of hiding things.

Where did the Easter egg hunt come from?

The egg has long been used as a symbol of new life and, in the Christian tradition, of Christ’s resurrection and the empty tomb. Professor Lizette Larson-Miller of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley traces organised egg hunts back to Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer:

“We know that Martin Luther had Easter egg hunts where the men hid the eggs for the women and children, and it probably has this connection back to this idea of eggs being the tomb.”

Reverend Mary Jane Pierce Norton, Associate General Secretary of Leadership Ministries at the General Board of Discipleship, adds another layer to it:

“There’s something about going to hunt the eggs just as we might go to hunt for Jesus in the tomb. And when we find them it’s that joy that the women had when they reached the tomb first and found that Jesus was no longer there.”

Whatever your own family’s traditions or beliefs, the egg hunt has stuck around because it’s simple, cheap, and genuinely fun for children. It just needs a few adjustments when your “hunter” is still in nappies.

Think about your baby’s stage first

A one year old’s Easter egg hunt looks very different to a six month old’s, and that’s worth planning for before you buy a single plastic egg.

• Not yet mobile: your baby won’t be hunting for anything. This is really a sensory activity. Sitting on a blanket surrounded by eggs to pick up, shake and mouth is plenty of fun at this stage.
• Sitting but not crawling: scatter eggs within easy arm’s reach so baby can lean and grab without toppling over.
• Crawling: you can spread eggs a little further apart to encourage some movement, but keep the whole area small and manageable.
• Cruising or newly walking: this is where it starts to feel like a “real” hunt. Keep eggs on flat, even ground so baby isn’t tempted to chase one across uneven grass and lose balance.

If you’ve got older children or cousins joining in too, it often works best to run two separate hunts, or two separate zones, one with baby-safe eggs at ground level for the little one, and a proper hunt with smaller eggs and sweets for the bigger kids, kept well out of baby’s reach.

Setting it up, step by step

1. Pick your spot and your timing

Outdoors is easiest if the weather allows, since you’re not trying to fit a crowd of relatives into the living room. A garden, a patch of park, or even a large balcony all work. Try to time the hunt around your baby’s usual nap and feed schedule rather than around when guests arrive, an overtired baby is not going to enjoy being dressed up and paraded around for photos.

If it’s sunny, remember that babies under six months shouldn’t have sunscreen applied unless your GP or health visitor has specifically advised it, so keep them in the shade, dressed in light layers, and use a hat or a shaded pram instead. For older babies, a baby-safe sunscreen and a hat are worth having on hand.

2. Dress up, if you want to

A little bunny ears headband or a soft Easter outfit makes for lovely photos, and babies generally tolerate dressing up far better than toddlers do, so it’s worth taking advantage of it while you can. Just make sure whatever you choose is soft, doesn’t restrict movement, and has nothing small enough to chew off and swallow, like buttons or loose pom poms.

3. Choose and fill the eggs carefully

This is the bit that needs the most thought when there’s a baby involved. Small plastic eggs are a genuine choking hazard for babies and toddlers under three, so if your baby is likely to put things in their mouth, it’s worth using the larger, jumbo-sized plastic eggs rather than the small classic ones, or going with real hollowed and decorated hard-boiled eggs that are too big to fit in a mouth whole.

Skip sweets and chocolate for the baby’s own eggs. Chocolate melts, sweets are a choking risk, and neither is suitable for babies anyway. Better fillings for a baby-friendly hunt include:

• Small teething toys or soft rattles
• Fabric scraps or ribbon offcuts with different textures
• A folded piece of card with a photo inside for older relatives to see later
• Bath toys, if the eggs will end up being handled and mouthed

Whatever goes inside, check it’s non-toxic and free of small detachable parts, and check the eggs themselves are made from non-toxic plastic or paint, since they’ll almost certainly end up in your baby’s mouth at some point. If your baby is going through a throwing phase, skip real hard-boiled eggs altogether, a boiled egg to the face is not the memory you’re after.

4. Set up the hunt to match your baby’s ability

Check the grass or ground first and clear away anything sharp, anything a baby could pull down on top of themselves, and any real stones or debris that might get mixed up with the eggs. Then keep the “hunting area” small and contained, a few square metres is plenty for a first hunt.

If your baby is crawling, space six to ten eggs at short, easy distances so there’s a sense of moving from one to the next without too much effort. If they’re not mobile yet, forget the hunting part entirely and just put a small pile or basket of eggs in front of them on a blanket. Watching a baby methodically pick up, examine, shake and drop a row of eggs is genuinely entertaining, and it’s exactly the kind of “hunt” a six or eight month old is ready for.

5. Make it visually interesting

Babies respond far more to bold colour, contrast and movement than to the idea of a “hunt”, so lean into that rather than expecting them to search for anything. Bright primary colours, shiny surfaces, and simple high-contrast patterns catch attention much faster than pastel eggs hidden in green grass. Large cardboard cut-outs of bunnies or flowers dotted around also give you a nice colourful backdrop for photos, and double as visual markers baby can focus on.

6. Stay close and keep watching

Treat this like any other supervised playtime. Stay within arm’s reach the entire time, especially outdoors where there’s more to bump into, more uneven ground, and more small objects lying around than in a childproofed living room. You may have checked the area thoroughly beforehand, but babies are quick and curious, and it only takes a second for something small to end up in a mouth.

Making it a keepsake

Take more photos than you think you need, you won’t regret it. A basket, a blanket, a bunny outfit and a scattering of colourful eggs makes a lovely, simple scene, and it’s one of those “firsts” that’s genuinely worth capturing properly. If you want to build a proper family tradition out of it, keep one egg from each year (an empty, washed one works fine) with the date written inside, and you’ll have a nice little collection by the time your baby is old enough to actually run the hunt themselves.

If you enjoyed this article, take a look at our other Easter guides:

“70 Candy-Free Ideas For Baby’s First Easter Basket“