In my (US) family, when I was a child, we – kids and parents – would dye hard-boiled eggs a day or two before Easter. It was quite an elaborate process, with my two brothers and I trying to outdo one another's efforts. We had striped eggs, speckled eggs, swirled eggs, and my personal favorite: eggs that were colored with crayons before dyeing, preferably with something funny or punny written on them.

The eggs would be refrigerated until Easter morning, when they would be placed in our Easter boxes. The box was a wooden craft item my grandfather had made years earlier: a shallow rectangular box, with 2 standing rabbit silhouettes attached to the short ends of the box; a crosspiece (with 6 holes for the eggs to stand in) went from one rabbit to the other at neck level. Easter grass and candy was placed in the shallow box below. Any overflow-candy went into a regular Easter basket. Each child also had a decorated plastic egg with a hole in one end and a diorama scene inside, that went into the basket every year.

I don't remember attending more than one or two Easter Egg hunts in my lifetime, and no "rolls", but whatever I attended was sponsored by a neighborhood organization or a church. We never had a family Easter Egg hunt with real eggs; my parents sometimes hid eggs indoors but used the hollow plastic eggs (so that real eggs would not be forgotten and become spoiled after weeks under the sofa). Some of the plastic eggs had candy inside; some not.

BTW, a former co-worker of mine told me that her family tradition was to put money (in large bills – up to $100!) inside the plastic eggs and hide them around her house for her kids (even the adult kids) to find!

But my parents had a family tradition that I've never heard of, anywhere else: "Noggins". On Easter morning my mother would make soft-boiled eggs an put them in a bowl on the table. At breakfast, each of us would choose an egg, then tap the end of it (gently) against the end of the egg of the next person at the table until one of the eggs cracked. The rule was that the ends of the eggs had to correspond at first (pointy egg against pointy end, and dull end against dull end). If one person's egg remained uncracked, that person won the cracked egg from the other person. If each person had one cracked end, then the two uncracked ends would be tapped against one another until one cracked, and the person with one egg-end still intact would win the cracked egg. The loser would then take another egg from the bowl and try again. The game continued until the bowl was empty and one person emerged victorious with an egg with at least one uncracked end. Of course, this resulted in some people having more "loser" eggs on their plates than others, but at the end of the game we would divide the eggs evenly among the family members before we ate the eggs for breakfast. Has anyone else ever played this game?