KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The Easter Bunny has a helicopter.

Hopping down the bunny trail is so-ooo 20th century.

These days, the bunny arrives with theatrical flair, chucking plastic Easter eggs from the sky for throngs of young basket-carrying and bag-carrying marauders waiting below.

The “egg drop” is the new Easter egg hunt. From Nevada to New Hampshire, churches — including GracePoint in Shawnee, Kan., and Noland Road Baptist in Independence, Mo., — are celebrating Easter by air-dropping candy-filled eggs onto baseball and soccer fields, parks, playgrounds, parking lots, landing strips.

Like the live turkeys in that famous “WKRP in Cincinnati” Thanksgiving stunt gone wrong, the eggs are typically disgorged from helicopters, as they will be at the local churches today.

But in one town outside Fort Worth, Texas, this year, event organizers will fling eggs — and stuffed animals wearing handmade parachutes — out of a DC-3.

And on Easter at a church in Jonesboro, Ga., after the baptisms, thousands of treat-filled plastic eggs will be tossed to the ground from a hot-air balloon.

If you drop them, they will come.

By the thousands.

Last weekend, a new church in a suburb of Jacksonville, Fla., scattered eggs across a soccer field.

“When thousands of eager kids show up with baskets and bags, screaming, ‘We want eggs!’ 20,000 plastic eggs falling from a helicopter is a bit like one M&M being tossed to a starving man,” the local newspaper wrote.

During the event, the church’s pastor, who seriously underestimated the turnout, tweeted: “Pandemonium.”

“We did an egg drop two years ago on the Saturday before Easter,” another organizer recently posted on a national children’s ministry website.

“We had about 4,000 people show up. … About 20 minutes before it started I was praying: ‘Dear Jesus, don’t send anyone else.’ “

 

Copy the Story Link