This post originally appeared on Jane’s Interfaith and Jewish blog.

If you or your Jewish partner is like me, you remember your childhood Passover seders as long and boring affairs. There was no child-friendly Haggadah, toy plagues, or jumping around as everyone sang “Frogs here! Frogs there! Frogs were jumping everywhere.” Maybe there was a kids’ table, which was acknowledged only when the youngest was asked to recite the Four Questions.

As an adult, whether you are Jewish or from another background, you may have wondered, why can’t Passover be fun? The answer is, it can be. The holiday can retain its serious and important message and be enjoyable. It just takes a little creativity.

When my son was a toddler, I thought a lot, about how I wanted him to view Judaism. As an intermarried Jew raising a Jewish child, I wanted him to associate observance with fun and enjoyment, rather than obligation. I didn’t wanted his childhood memories of faith to be the same as my husband’s or mine–more serious than fun.

Because of our early experiences, my husband and I shared the feeling that it was important to make the holidays and Judaism enjoyable in order for our son to develop a strong connection to the Jewish faith. I only needed to look at my own extended family to see what a lack of positive religious experiences did to a person’s desire to continue to be observant when they reached adulthood. A Jewish relative, who inmarried, observed the holidays out of obligation and not because he derived any fulfillment from the experience.

My husband and I believed that by increasing the fun quotient of holidays when our son was young we could make the celebrations more memorable, without diminishing their significance. We felt this was especially important for an interfaith family because by creating positive Jewish experiences year-round, we avoided the need to pack a full year’s worth of Jewish identity building into December.

So, we spiced up our Passover observance. When our son was a toddler, we read Passover children’s books and sang the holiday songs learned in preschool. We told the story of the Exodus using a Shalom Sesame coloring book. I photocopied the pages and let the kids at our seder color them while the adults read the story. We read Sammy Spider’s First Passover and Dinosaur on Passover instead of reading a traditional Haggadah. We used a child-friendly seder printed from the Internet. As our son got older, we watched the many Passover parodies on YouTube.

We didn’t worry that how we told the Passover story was unconventional. After all, we were simply commanded to tell the story. Contrary to what Jewish parents of a certain generation thought, there was no rule to how it was told. A Haggadah wasn’t required nor did a seder need to be the same as our mothers’ or mother-in-laws’. We were free to do what we wanted.

As you get ready for Passover, think about how you can create happy memories by celebrating the holiday in a slightly different way. Work to nurture your child’s connection to Judaism so that it will be the foundation for observance later in life. Use a less traditional approach to connect members of your family from different backgrounds to the holiday. Remember the words of Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi, the editor of the Mishna (Jewish Oral Law codified about 200 CE.), “For only the lesson enjoyed is the lesson learned.”

Below are a few suggestions for injecting some creativity into your Passover celebration. Use them or come up with your own.

• Introduce nontraditional elements into you ritual. Watch Passover-themed parodies of popular songs. Distribute toy plagues to all guests. Read a children’s book. Draw parallels between the Exodus and contemporary life – political and personal.
• Sing or play contemporary children’s and Jewish Passover music–go beyond Dayenu. Check out The Maccabeats, The Fountainheads, ShirLaLa Passover, and Six13.
• Make matzah pyramids and decorate them gingerbread-house-style.
• Tape bubble wrap to the floors and let kids and adults run and jump on it to simulate the hail plague.
• Do a Passover science experiment–place different types of red liquids/wet ingredients in bowls (water dyed red with food coloring, red paint and strawberry yogurt, etc.). Give each child a straw. Ask them to “part” the Red Seas by blowing into the straw over each bowl. Which liquid is easier to move or part? How does the density of the liquid affect movement? If the Red Sea was made of a thick liquid how easy or hard would it have been to cross? Would the Israelites have escaped the Egyptians?
• Play Passover bingo and other games. See Jewish Holidays in a Box for ideas.
• Introduce new foods to the meal. Food is an easy way to honor different backgrounds. Serve a dish that is respectful of Passover dietary rules, but a traditional part of a family member’s or guest’s Easter dinner. Celebrate the ethnic background of those at your table by including Passover dishes from the cultures represented at your seder. Look at the cookbook Entrée to Judaism for ideas.
• Borrow from the Easter bunny. Eggs are a symbol of Passover and Easter. Have an afikomen egg hunt. Break the afikomen into small pieces. Place the pieces inside plastic colored-eggs used for Easter baskets. Hide the afikomen-filled eggs. Have the children search for them. Give out Passover candy as prizes.