Easter Bunny Time! HOP Star James Marsden Talks Family’s Easter Traditions
James Marsden had a pretty good weekend. HOP, the new family film, opened last Friday and came in number one at the box office. Besides starring in films like Hairspray and Enchanted, Marsden is busy raising his ten-year-old boy and five-year-old daughter making doing a family film like this a pretty sweet treat. He recently sat down with a group of mommy bloggers to discuss Hop, Easter and of course the Easter Bunny.
What were some of your favorite Easter traditions growing up or with your family now? What are you going to do?
James Marsden: We did the normal traditions. We did Easter Eve, we never called it that, but the night before, we would die eggs and paint them. We didn’t do anything outlandish or too different than most. We would wake up and the baskets and the candy would be there and we would have a hunt in the backyard, which always ended up in a fight, by the way.
With the Easter baskets, do the kids get to eat all the candy at once, as much as they can in one day or is it rationed out?
They’re actually pretty good at stopping when they start to feel sick. The Easter Bunny does a good job at mixing it up with candies that they may or may not like.
When I was a kid, I would do the Easter hunt and we had these plastic eggs that connect and have a dollar or five bucks in them. I have two brothers really close in age, so we would always end up fighting. One of us would say, “You got more eggs than me.”
Since your kids are familiar with the Easter traditions, how are they about you actually playing an Easter Bunny?
I don’t think they know, to be honest. I didn’t want to spoil anything for them. They know I’m in an Easter Bunny movie and they’re excited about it, but they don’t know much about the plot and they don’t really care, actually. They’re proud of me but I’m “Dad” to them and it’s their reality. They act as if they thought every other kid at their school had a dad who was an actor, which kind of is the case.
How you deal with the magic of holidays. Is your 10-yea- old son mumbling things to your five-year-old daughter?
No, because my 10 year old son is a believer. He hears things from kids at school, but my wife has been really good about that. My wife still believes. She’s said, “My father taught me that if you believe in it, it’s there.”
When she grew up, her family would play Christmas songs, and have hot chocolate and there would be a fade-in sound of hearing bells from the distance and a glowing red light in the middle of the forest. Santa really put on a show for her, so we do a lot of that. Our principal is if you believe it, we try and make it as magical of an experience as possible.
Santa makes the experience as magical as possible. We believe it. My wife believes, so the kids do.
My son came home and said, “People at school are telling me that there’s no such thing as Santa Claus.” And I said, “Oh, that’s too bad. Some people don’t believe in it.”
Source: Babble.com