Othello Easter Egg Hunt draws large crowd, plans for bigger event next year

OTHELLO — The Othello Holiday Committee put on Othello’s first Easter Egg Hunt event in Lions Park on Saturday afternoon, drawing in a large attendance according to Committee Manager Tania Morelos.

“It was a great turnout. There were a lot of people. We had 6000 eggs,” Morelos said. “6000 eggs sounded like a lot, until it wasn't. So we just realized we need a lot more. When we were filling them we just thought it was a crazy amount of eggs, but it was over in less than a minute, for sure.”

Morelos said the committee is considering how to make the event last longer. Simply adding more eggs may help, but Morelos said the hunt still might end fairly quickly.

“If we do that, we're going to need a lot more help and support from the community, because we didn't make a single penny off of this event,” she said. “The money that we did put into it came from our Christmas fund. We were trying to be pretty frugal and pick and choose what we want to spend money on because we dipped into our Christmas event and that's our bigger event, so we don't want to take too much away from that.”

Morelos said the committee didn’t ask for much funding since the egg hunt was utilizing funds for A Christmas Miracle on Main Street. She said the committee will likely request more funding for next year’s event.

Despite some of the challenges of organizing an event for the first year, Morelos said the feedback was positive and community members have an interest in attending the event again.

“Basically a great turnout, more than we expected,” she said. “It was difficult to estimate how many eggs we needed. Obviously, this was our first trial, and now we know. There's probably going to be some changes next year.”

Safety is an issue the committee is looking at, Morelos said.

“There were some crowd control issues, especially in the toddler section. It was really important for us that parents would not enter the hunt areas, just because we felt like it was a safety issue, especially for the younger kids,” she said. “That was a little difficult to enforce, so that's the area that we're gonna meet about and hash out and see how we can do things differently next time because people chose not to follow the rules, so it was a little concerning.”

The committee said in a statement they will be looking to recruit a much larger number of adult volunteers to help organize the event and to better enforce the rules. 

“Other than that, like the first through sixth grade areas, everything went perfectly smooth,” Morelos said. “We were kind of talking about maybe not having a toddler section next year. We really don't want to do that, but we need to figure something out.”

The committee will be looking to expand the event to include more activities, Morelos said.

“We're hoping to add more next year, hopefully, maybe some bounce houses or face painting, just making it more of a longer activity day because people spend so much time preparing to come to this event just for one minute (hunting) and it’s over. There were lots of prize winners. They all were very happy. That went very smoothly. We had prizes from a bunch of businesses from the community; we ended up with over 40 Easter baskets, and then each section had a grand prize and it was a bike.”

The bikes were donated by The Cow Path Bakery, Lineage Logistics, Columbia Physical Therapy and Simplot. 

“This was our trial and error year. We wanted to see if we would even have a good response. Clearly, we did,” Morelos said. “We'll make it more organized next year … We were even thinking that if we add those activities, we could probably do the egg hunt by age groups at different times so it's not so chaotic.”

Morelos said this was the first year the committee expanded beyond its focus on A Christmas Miracle on Main Street. Aside from planning how to expand the Easter egg hunt, Morelos said the committee is also interested in looking at even more events in the future. 

Gabriel Davis may be reached at gdavis@columbiabasinherald.com.

    Saturday’s Easter Egg Hunt at Lions Park in Othello included prizes for the young egg hunters, ranging from about 40 easter baskets to bikes donated by local organizations, such as one donated by the Cow Path Bakery, pictured.
  

    Children begin hunting for eggs at Lions Park during Saturday’s Othello Egg Hunt. Othello Holiday Committee Manager Tania Morelos said the event was over in less than a minute.
  

    Hundreds of children line up at different sections of Othello’s Lions Park for the city’s first-ever Easter Egg Hunt Saturday afternoon.