Easter Party Planning and Rental Ideas for Texas Families

Easter is one of the biggest and best holidays in the spring, whether you celebrate it for religious or secular reasons. Easter gatherings and galas promise to be something special this year too, with the expected vaccines and the possibility of lightened or lifted restrictions on gatherings. If you’re not already preparing for your Easter party, you should be; competition for rentals is likely to be fierce.

We know how much trouble it can be planning a party several months in advance, so we’re here to help. We’ve put together a huge list of free ideas below, recommendations for items you can rent, and tips for party success. You can also feel free to give us a call to talk about the options we have for your party.

Easter Party Ideas

When you think of Easter, what comes to mind? Easter egg hunts, Easter bunnies, green grass, the warmth of spring? We can’t rent the weather, but you can certainly put together a winning party out of the core components.

Decorate Easter eggs with the family. Decorating eggs is a time-honored tradition for Easter that stretches all the way back to nearly 2,000 years ago, though the tradition of decorating eggs, in general, is much, much older.

Decorating eggs can be a family-friendly and fun event for parents and children of all ages. For young kids, start with stickers and plastic eggs. As they get older, consider wooden eggs and paints, or the traditional dye and hard-boiled egg combination. Put the eggs on display, or keep them in the fridge to eat later.

Set up an Easter egg hunt. An Easter egg hunt is one of the most iconic activities of the holiday. Scattering eggs around the house or the yard, getting the kids to hunt for them, and receiving prizes for them; who wouldn’t love it?

You can go the traditional route with plastic eggs filled with candy and treats, including a handful of coins if you want something easy. Another option is to take the eggs your family decorated in days previous and hide those, rewarding people for finding their own eggs. If the eggs themselves don’t contain treats, they can be traded in for treats.

There are, of course, a few organized Easter events around north Texas you can attend as well. We’ll have to wait until closer to the date to see how they fare with COVID restrictions, though.

Easter egg window displays. Several holidays have received the social distancing makeover this year, with the Halloween candy chutes and holiday window decorations being two of the most common. Easter may be no different, depending on the situation, so one possible option is to set up a window display of Easter eggs. You can set up actually decorated eggs in the windows, or you can cut out egg-shaped pieces of paper to decorate for something a little more visible from a distance. Just remember not to store real eggs in a hot spring window; that won’t be pleasant after a few days.

Easter bunny encounters. The Easter bunny is a time-honored tradition, though how it ties into the religious origins of the holiday is a bit up in the air. There are a bunch of different options you can use for an Easter bunny encounter, from renting actual bunnies to play with, buying a life-sized stuffed Easter bunny, or renting the time of a trained Easter bunny actor. Combine this with other Easter fun, like Easter baskets, and you’re in for a great time with the family.

An additional option that is a little rarer to find is a live petting zoo. Just make sure that you’re picking a reputable company that treats their animals properly and cares for them. As an added note, don’t get bunnies for your kids if you aren’t willing to care for them as long-term pets!

Enjoy the food of the season. Easter might not be as known for food as holidays like thanksgiving, but who doesn’t love a little food? Easter is a time of growth and renewal; make a menu out of fresh fruits and veggies. You can also make Easter-themed dishes using eggs (including the decorated eggs from before), or just decorated items. Sometimes, all it takes is a cake with a bunny drawn on it in spring pastels to make a party a success.

Use eggs as part of a game. Easter egg hunts are the best-known egg game for Easter, but there are always other options. Plastic eggs make for a safe and fun alternative to real eggs, and allow you to do anything from egg-and-spoon races to “egg” throwing challenges to eggshell stacking. Split up plastic eggs and see who can match colors to reunite the eggs the fastest.

For a spring event with water usage, get everyone to wear disposable white shirts and soak foam “eggs” in water with food coloring. You see where we’re going with this one, right?

Easter Party Rentals

The core of every great party is the unique decorations, activities, entertainers, and accessories that make it memorable. We’re always here to rent party décor, activities, and entertainers to make your party a success. We’ll list many options below, but feel free to browse our offerings through the navigation bar above, or give us a call to ask what we have available. We service most of the North Texas and DFW area, and your calls are always welcome.

Entertainers. We’ve already mentioned hiring the time of a trained Easter bunny suit wearer, but that’s only one of the many entertainer options you may have available. Easter-themed magic shows with a trained magician can be fun for the kids. Every spring and summer fair has its own array of entertainers too, so why not consider:

• Airbrush tattoo artists.
• Face painters.
• Balloon artists.
• Clowns.
• Stilt walkers.

Or another entertainer we offer? Entertainers can take some of the burdens off of watchful parents and can help make your Easter celebration a fun and memorable day.

Bounce houses and other inflatables. Spring is just about the perfect time to rent a bounce house. It’s not too hot, so it’s not sweltering inside. It’s not too cold, making outdoor activities difficult. The weather is generally quite nice, so there’s a lot of openings. We offer a wide range of inflatable devices, including bounce houses, water slides, obstacle courses, and games. Booking one for a small party, or two or three for a larger church gathering can ensure that your kids always have something to do throughout the day of the party.

Larger gatherings can look into carnival-style attractions as well, including mechanical bulls, spin the apple machines, the trackless train, and even a zip line. While they aren’t exactly Easter themed, they’re still perfect for an outdoor gathering in late spring, particularly here in northern Texas.

For smaller gatherings, or for larger gatherings where you want an array of different activities, you might also want to look into a variety of carnival games. With everything from can smash to horseshoes to ring the bell games, there’s something for everyone. Make sure to book a handful of different activities for kids (and adults) to go through to test their skill, power, or dexterity.

Also, while spring is about celebrating the end of winter, you can still bring back a little of those cooler months with a synthetic ice rink, for a fun activity that doesn’t actually require cold weather and ice to work.

Party setup. Remember that you need more to have a successful party than just a few games and activities. Where are the parents going to sit? What is everyone going to eat? There are a lot of questions you should consider.

• Make sure you have an array of furniture for your party. Tables, chairs, tents to keep it all shaded for tired parents and kids, and even generators to keep everything up and running are easy to rent.
• Don’t forget the food! While your main meal might be an Easter dinner with the family or a church potluck, that doesn’t mean your day needs to be void of snacks. Consider cotton candy, popcorn, snow-cones, or ice cream treats as snacks throughout the day.
• Consider turning memories into tangible goodies with event photography. Whether it’s a photo booth, an Easter-themed green screen background, or just a simple event photographer, keeping someone around to capture the memories so you don’t have to is always a great idea.

You might also need to consider some of the less glamorous realities of a large gathering, like trash receptacles, cutlery, and washing stations if you’re not holding your event in a venue with access to bathrooms. As always, feel free to give us a call and we’ll see what we can do for you.

Tips for a Successful Easter Gathering

While we can’t be there to solve all of your problems – your in-laws are not our responsibility – we can help you make your party successful in a lot of other ways. Starting, here today, with these tips.

When hiding eggs, make a cheat sheet. An Easter egg hunt is good fun, right up until it’s two days later and you’re wondering if you got them all. It’s one thing to stumble upon a plastic egg with a half-melted Snickers bite in it, but it’s quite another if you’re hiding real decorated hard-boiled eggs. Our pro-tip is to make a cheat sheet of locations when you’re hiding the eggs. That way, when the party is over, you can go through and make sure they’re all accounted for.

Make sure to plan for inclement weather. It’s one thing to count on the nicer weather of spring to hold when you’re planning a party, but it’s another for you to arrive on the day of and have nothing to do because of a rainstorm. Prepare for the best, expect the worst.

Depending on the size of your gathering, you may need to book a secondary venue in case an outdoor venue doesn’t work out for weather reasons. You may need some alternative or backup entertainment; hiding eggs doesn’t work in an open gymnasium for example, and you can’t set up a large bounce house inside. Of course, some rentals work fine either way; some of the carnival games, face painters, and Easter bunnies are all perfectly content in either situation.

A backup is something no one ever wants to have to deal with, but it’s better to have a plan than not.

Plan your party ahead of time. Planning a party is a lot of work, and the more time you give yourself to do it, the more time you have to think and prepare. Maybe you’ll have a great idea for décor, a game, or food you want at the party. Maybe you want more than one backup option in case things go wrong. Maybe you want to manage your guest list carefully. If nothing else, the situation with COVID is changing on a monthly basis, and what you’re planning, for now, might not be the same situation when April rolls around.

Book rentals well in advance. Rentals, in particular, are something you want to get out of the way as soon as possible. We start booking our Easter rentals as early as January, so the longer you wait, the more chance there is that the rental items you want are already booked up on the day of your party. Give yourself plenty of time.

It can take a lot of work to make a holiday party a success, and Easter is no different. Prepare ahead, book your rentals as soon as you have a date and some idea of what you want, and work for a backup plan. We’re more than willing to help make your party as much of a success as we can, so give us a call or drop us a line on our contact page and we’ll be happy to assist you.

Any ideas we may have missed or you would be interested in adding to the list? Be sure to leave a comment down below to let us know!