Woman claims lottery ticket during family Easter egg hunt — and wins much bigger prize

A Maryland family’s offbeat Easter egg hunt tradition left one woman $50,000 richer, lottery officials reported.

The family uses numbered scratch-off tickets as prizes. The numbered tickets correspond with numbers placed inside plastic eggs for the annual egg hunts, the Maryland Lottery said in an April 2 news release.

“We all like scratch tickets,” Melissa Blessing told officials. “And, since there are no kids involved in our gathering, they make great replacements for candy.”

Blessing, a Harford County 911 operator, claimed a $5 “Money Money Money” scratch-off ticket at this year’s festivities. When she scratched it off, she was initially confused.

“I saw the match and must have read over the instructions five times,” Blessing told lottery officials.

“Am I looking at this right?” she asked her family, who confirmed she’d just won the top prize of $50,000.

Blessing, of Havre de Grace, told lottery officials she plans to travel and pay bills with her winnings.

“I still can’t believe this has happened,” she said. “As we were all leaving, everyone was saying that this was an Easter we’ll be talking about for years.”

Havre de Grace is about a 40 mile drive northeast of Baltimore.