We love making these empty tomb cookies with the kids leading up to Easter because they are super simple. All you need are graham crackers, mini donuts, mini Oreos, some icing and sprinkles, and a ‘He is risen’ flag.
My kids love making these – and eating them! We’ve also used them for Messy Church and we’ll make them with friends at Easter parties.
My favourite part is that there is minimal prep on my part, which means it’s easy to fit these in amidst all the other Easter commitments and preparations (like cooking dinner, hosting parties, running an Easter egg hunt, and keeping the house from looking like a nuclear fallout zone).
How to Make Empty Tomb Cookies
So this isn’t exactly a recipe, because all the things are already baked from you. (Hooray!) That is one of my favourite parts of this activity. Seriously.
These empty tomb cookies are super simple for the kids to make, because they are just assembling the pieces – and maybe not eating too many sprinkles and icing while they are doing so!
Materials
- mini donuts
- tiny Oreos
- white icing
- green sprinkles or icing
- graham crackers
- toothpick, paper, a pen, and glue (optional)
Empty Tomb Assembly Instructions
How to make your empty tomb cookies:
- Snap the graham crackers in half so that you have graham squares.
- Cover the graham crackers with icing. You can use white icing and green sprinkles (at a later step) for the grass, or just use green icing.
- Stand a mini donut up on the back half of the graham cracker. The icing will make it stick.
- Stand a mini Oreo up in front of the donut. This gives the appearance of a tomb and a stone that has been rolled away.
- Use some green sprinkles for the grass, unless you’ve used green icing earlier.
- Take a small piece of paper and fold it in half. Write “He is risen!” on the front half.
- Secure your piece of paper to a toothpick with tape or glue to make a flag.
- Stick your “He is risen!” flag into the top of the donut.
Done. Empty tomb cookies that you didn’t have to bake.
The kids could probably make a dozen of these in about 10 minutes. If you let them do that, also make sure you make them run around the block also about a dozen times.
The Story
As you are making your empty tomb cookies with the kids, you can tell them the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection:
To begin our story, I want you to picture yourself in a garden. After his last supper with his disciples, Jesus went to a garden to pray. While he was there, a large mob of people with swords and clubs came and had him arrested.
Now the religious leaders at the time had grown so angry with Jesus that they came up with a plan to have him killed.
And so, the leaders put Jesus on trial. “Are you the Son of God?” they asked him.
“I Am,” Jesus said.
“Who do you think you are, calling yourself God? You must die for calling yourself the Son of God!”
Only the Roman soldiers were allowed to kill prisoners, so the leaders made a plan to have the Romans crucify Jesus.
During Jesus’ trial, Pilate, who was like a judge at the time, tried to let Jesus go, but the crowd insisted: “Crucify him!” And so, Pilate handed Jesus over to the Roman soldiers to be crucified.
When Jesus died, a man named Joseph took his body down from the cross and buried it in a tomb.
That’s what the donut represents: the tomb in which Jesus was buried.
Joseph buried Jesus’ body the night before the Sabbath – the day when everyone rested. And so, the next day Roman soldiers guarded the tomb but no one went to visit. On the third day, Mary Magdalene, and the other women who had been with Jesus when he died, went to the tomb with spices to anoint Jesus’ body.
When they got to the tomb, they found that the stone that had sealed it shut was rolled away.
That’s what the cookie represents: the stone that had been rolled away from the entrance of the tomb.
The women went inside the tomb, but they didn’t find Jesus’ body. They were confused: where was he? Did someone steal the body?
Suddenly, they saw a man in bright, shiny clothes – an angel. The angel told them, “Jesus isn’t here anymore. He’s alive again!”
Now the women were confused; they were frightened; but they were also filled with joy. As the other women rushed home, Mary Magdalene stayed behind. How could this be true? she wondered. How could Jesus be alive again?
Just then, she heard someone else in the garden outside the tomb. It must be the gardener, she thought.
That’s what the green sprinkles represent: the grass in the garden.
“I don’t know where Jesus is!” Mary cried.
When the man approached her, he said her name gently, “Mary.”
Instantly, Mary recognized that it wasn’t a gardener. It was Jesus! “Jesus!” she exclaimed. And she fell to the ground at his feet. All she wanted to do at that moment was cling to Jesus and never let him go.
But Jesus gently lifted her up. “You’ll be able to hold onto me later, Mary,” he assured her. “But for now, go and tell the others that I’m alive.”
And that’s why we have the flag: He is risen. Jesus is alive.
[Story adapted from Matthew 26-28, Mark 14-16, Luke 22-24, John 20.]