14,000 Eggs & 72 Characters: A New Kind Of Scavenger Hunt Hits Bourne
Those who noticed an unusually high volume of children and families exploring Bourne last weekend may be wondering why. The answer is simple, but is likely to prompt further curiosity: there was a townwide scavenger hunt, consisting of 72 locations (each marked with a hyper-realistic cartoon character) and 14,000 plastic eggs stuffed with treats and goodies spread throughout the town’s seven villages.
The Easter Egg Scavenger Hunt, held last Sunday,, March 24, drew hundreds of attendees and invoked a community-wide feeling of joviality, which are each impressive feats for a windy, overcast Sunday morning during the Cape’s off-season. What is more impressive, however, is the fact that the entire event is planned, organized and executed by one local woman and her supportive family.
Shelbi Lynn Palmer, a resident of Buzzards Bay, said that her continued creation of the dozens and dozens of wooden cartoon character cutouts—the true stars of last week’s event—all started when her husband, Richard Palmer, requested a wooden cutout of the Grinch, classically posed in a Santa suit as he slinks away with stolen Christmas lights.
“Of course, he didn’t want the three-foot tall one, he wanted the six-foot tall one,” Ms. Palmer said. “So, I made it out of wood and painted it and then it didn’t stop there; then he wanted the tree and he wanted the Whoville [people].”
That was Christmas of 2022. The creations culminated in a full blown Whoville outside of the Palmers’ Buzzards Bay home and even a Christmas event, during which Ms. Palmer said her family gave out hot chocolates and small gifts to attendees.
Things went so well, she said, that she started making more characters. By Easter 2023, she had managed to create 46 of the wooden character cutouts and even organized the inaugural iteration of the townwide Easter Egg Hunt, which is slowly but surely becoming a yearly tradition.
”What Am I Going To Do With These Characters?”
Ms. Palmer works diligently on each of her wooden characters, crafting each one with the care and precision of a professional artist—though she says her creations are much more a hobby or passion project than a profession.
“It’s just me; it’s just a hobby and I love to create things,” Ms. Palmer said in a phone interview this week. “I work hard on them. It probably takes two days just to make one because on the characters, it’s three to four coats of each color of paint. And then I have to cut the wood with a jigsaw, sand them, do the backs, and do a clear coat—it’s a lot of work for them.”
Once Christmas had passed, Ms. Palmer found herself in spring 2023 asking herself, “What am I going to do with these characters?” Christmas is one thing—the Palmer’s are self-described “Christmas junkies”—but Ms. Palmer hated the thought of her characters being tucked away in her sister-in-law’s basement until the next Christmas.
“I put up a post and was like, ‘Hey, would anybody be willing to host a character and we can make this a townwide scavenger hunt?’ and everybody was just like, me, me, me, me!” Ms. Palmer said. “By then I knew—we were writing down addresses and putting together maps and putting eggs together.”
Some of the 72 characters include: Spongebob and Squidward, Chip from Beauty and the Beast, Dumbo, Paw Patrol, Bluey, Elmo, Moana, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Mike Wazowski, and Nova, a baby reindeer character created by local author Deborah Thompson, of Marion, who created the character for her children’s book “Nova’s Wish.”
This year an additional 25 characters were added to the bunch—all created between January and last Sunday by Ms. Palmer herself.
“It was a little crazy,” Ms. Palmer said of the feat. “I just keep making them. I do a sheet of plywood and I get three characters out of that sheet… This year, I’m going to try to just keep making them because I already have nine people who want to be added to the 72. It just keeps growing and growing.”
All of the hard work paid off Sunday morning, though, when Ms. Palmer was blown away by what seemed to be “thousands of people” flocking to each of Bourne’s villages to visit their favorite characters and hunt down some eggs.
“I don’t even know what happened,” Ms. Palmer said. “It was crazy because I blinked and it was over. All a sudden I turned around and people were coming out of their cars. It was like a flock of geese—it was insane!”
To Ms. Palmer, small parts of the day went slightly awry—her outdoor decorations were blowing around in the strong winds, and she had to move her balloon artist indoors—but the egg hunt’s resounding success was evident in the sheer number of families that came to experience and participate in it.
By 11:15 that morning, Ms. Palmer said, there were so many attendees that she actually ran out of some supplies. It was a good sign, though, that so many people had turned up, and judging by the comments on Ms. Palmer’s Facebook page—which serves as her home base for almost everything related to the event—the egg hunters were having too much fun to notice, anyway.
A New Tradition Is “Bourne”
The gist of the event is simple: see your favorite characters, get some Easter goodies and have fun. In Ms. Palmer’s own words, “It’s kind of like Halloween, but it’s not scary.” And a look at her Facebook page reveals hundreds of photographs from delighted parents, evidence that all three of those goals were well achieved last Sunday morning in all corners of Bourne.
Aside from the help she gets from her husband and their seven children, the effort on behalf of Ms. Palmer is largely a one-woman show. But the community of Bourne, she said, does play a major role in helping her make the character egg hunt happen.
Utilizing the Bourne Residents Facebook page, Ms. Palmer spent the last few months crowdsourcing donations and other forms of support from neighbors looking to contribute to the day of townwide family fun. With the help of a public Amazon wish list and a Venmo account, Ms. Palmer was able to get the funds and supplies needed for the event, an estimated total of around $7,000, including but not limited to plastic eggs, fidget spinners, puzzles, bouncy balls, spin tops, and “all different kinds of candy you can think of.”
“They weren’t going and getting grandma’s jellybeans,” Ms. Palmer joked. “At each location there was a different item, and it was 200 of the same item at each location, and it was people in town donating different goods.”
Facebook is where Ms. Palmer does most of her organizing; it’s how she keeps track of and assigns each of the 72 characters to their temporary homes and how she maintains transparency with the community in return for their kind donations.
“Every time I’d get a donation, I put it all on my table and take a picture and say ‘thank you’ because there are a lot of people out there, unfortunately, that have bad hearts, and they don’t use donations or things for the right things,” Ms. Palmer said. “So I try to make sure people know that I’m not scamming them and I’m not trying to take people’s money—I try to make it so that everyone is aware of what I’m doing, and try to just keep everybody in the same loop.”
Word travels fast offline, too, Ms. Palmer realized—not everyone in town is on Facebook and may not have seen her posts, but they certainly notice when vivid cartoon cutouts start appearing in their neighbors’ yard for the second spring in a row.
“Now this is the second year that they see this character, so they’ve been asking questions,” Ms. Palmer said. “And if they didn’t know what it was, they know now, because their neighbor will explain to them what is going on and what takes place.”
Easter 2025—Help Wanted!
With 2024 being only the event’s second year, Ms. Palmer is already looking ahead to future egg hunts and making plans on how to expand the event even more. She is planning to add more characters—drawing from a 72-page sheath of inspiration, each page containing a character group—and nine additional residences have since requested to be included as character hosts for next year.
“It’s like a family member now,” Ms. Palmer said of the characters. One residence, for example, has hosted Piglet for both years and, according to what the homeowner told Ms. Palmer, “is like [her] best friend.”
“Every time she gets Piglet, she says ‘I love just pulling in my driveway, seeing him, and waving hi,’” Ms. Palmer said.
With the event gaining popularity at such a rapid rate, though, Ms Palmer knows that she will definitely need reinforcements before Easter 2025.
“It’s just me, my husband and my kids that run it; I don’t have the resources that some other event people do have,” Ms. Palmer said. Next year will be even bigger, she added, and she certainly intends to recruit volunteers to help wrangle donations, planning and day-of event management.
“It can’t just be me, my husband and my kids, because everything happens so quick,” she said.
With Facebook being her main point of contact, readers interested in learning more about the event or getting involved in one way or another are asked to reach out to Shelbi Lynn Palmer via her main Facebook page.
In the meantime, all 72 of Ms. Palmer’s handmade characters will remain in place through Easter weekend and the week and weekend following, giving all members of the community a chance to seek out their favorites—or happily stumble upon them—through the beginning of April.
“It’s not going to be with the eggs or anything,” Ms. Palmer explained, “but the hosts around the town thought, ‘why not just open it up for Easter?’ So families can still drive by and take pictures—because it’s not about the eggs, it’s about the characters, the eggs are just a bonus. It’s more seeing [the characters] in person and how realistic they look.”