Easter! It’s coming in just five days! This is our first Easter in Oklahoma City which means our first Easter with our new church and our first Easter with new friends. We invited over friends who don’t have anywhere to go for Easter dinner. We’ll be doing ham and potatoes and homemade rolls and chocolate pie and…Easter egg hunts! Yes, hunt(s) – one for kids and one for grown-up kids. Our church meets in the evening, so after we’ve enjoyed time together, we’ll then go to church to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. It’s going to be a super day.
As part of the fun and preparation, I accepted the #CBias challenge to create a #KmartEaster Basket. The challenge was to use the Shop Your Way Rewards Program to find amazing deals at Kmart and create an awesome Easter basket for someone for under $30.
If I was creating an Easter basket for just one, I could have easily done it for under $30. As it was, I decided to make a family Easter basket for all of my girls to enjoy together. I have four girls. I found some great deals, but I did spend over $30 on the project, which I will explain a bit more below.
First things first – I was excited about this project and signed up to do it before I realized we don’t actually have any Kmart stores in Oklahoma City. The nearest Kmart is in Shawnee. I decided it was worth the drive and agreed to participate anyway. I’ve been wanting to go to Shawnee and poke around a bit. I didn’t actually get to do that today, but now I at least know where it is and comparatively speaking, it’s not *that* far. I drive to Norman every Monday night to take my kids to choir and it’s about the same distance from my house.
Since my goal here was to make a family Easter basket, I bought a basket from the home dec section instead of the Easter section. Each of my girls already has a nice Easter basket that still does the job, so I didn’t feel the need to buy any of them a new one this year. We have small children who come over to play sometimes, so I’m planning to use this family basket to keep toys and board books in in my living room after Easter. I spent quite a bit of time in this aisle:
The basket I chose was originally $17.99, but on sale today for $12.49. The next requirement of my shop was to choose a plush animal. I found this cute brown bunny, normally $5.99, on sale for $4.49.
From there I had freedom to choose what I wanted to. I selected some new toothbrushes for all of us, some new head bands, a new sketch book for each girl, and Peter Cottontail on DVD. Oh yes, and a Snickers Peanut Butter egg for everyone. The DVD was $7.99 and came with a free package of Oreos. The head bands were $4.49 for each package and the sketch books were $3.29 each. The toothbrushes cost $12.58 for six. This is higher than I usually pay for toothbrushes, but it was about the best price I could find at Kmart and it included getting one pack for free. All of that together came to $60.19, so I essentially doubled the challenge budget, but I did it for four kids instead of just one, so it averages out to about $15 per girl which I think is pretty decent.
I found a handful of other good deals at Kmart while I was there, including one-pound boxes of butter for only $1 each. Wowza! I bought 5 of those, but would have purchased a whole bunch more if I had more room to store it. I’ve never seen butter priced that low before!
All told, I earned 1,228 Shop Your Way points today. You can see more photos and commentary of my whole Kmart shopping experience in this Google + photo album.
Once I got home, I lined the basket with a length of springy green fabric and put empty eggs in the bottom of it to act as filler so the other things I purchased wouldn’t sink to the bottom. You can see what I did here in the very first photo I posted.
After that, it was time to load the basket:
I was going to place the basket out in the yard to give an authentic Easter feel to it, but here’s my yard today:
Swamp Land! This was the closest I could come – my front porch:
After snapping these photos, I hid the basket in my sewing room (shhh, don’t tell!). When I pull it out on Sunday, I will put each of the girls’ individual baskets near it with a couple of small things I’ve picked up along the way. It will look something like this, only times four:
This time last year we were in the midst of packing and preparing to move from St. Louis to Oklahoma City and I can tell you – I didn’t really do Easter baskets last year. I’m excited to bring it all out this year for my girls. They are going to enjoy this so much!
You can find Kmart on Twitter and Facebook.
This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias. #CBias All opinions expressed in this post really are my own honest thoughts. I keep a proper disclosure statement available here.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
What a great idea to do a family basket. Your’s turned out really cute.
I love that you used a non-traditional basket as your Easter basket! I was hoping to find a galvanized bucket or something like that but unfortunately didn’t have lunch. Also very cute to have the bunny holding the toothbrushes!
Now I’m excited for Easter!!!
aw how cute!
Thanks for the sweet thoughts here. Hard to believe it’s already time for Easter. Weren’t we just doing V-Day???
I love your idea to do a family Easter Basket!!! You did a great job!
Great basket! I think I should try a family basket next year…there are 3 kiddos over here… it may save me a headache.
I like the idea of repurposing the basket and it looks very pretty. Happy Easter!