Easter Presents

5. Easter Presents

Chocolate eggs are given to children. The eggs are either hollow or have a filling, and are usually covered with brightly coloured silver paper.

Small chocolate eggs are hidden for the children to find on the traditional Easter Egg Hunt.

Around 80 million chocolate eggs are eaten each year in Britain.

All kinds of fun are had with the hard-boiled decorated pace eggs.

Decorating and colouring eggs for Easter was a common custom in England in the middle ages. Eggs were brightly coloured to mimic the new, fresh colours of spring. The practice of decorating eggs was made even more famous by King Edward I of England who ordered 450 eggs to be gold-leafed and coloured for Easter gifts in 1290.

Egg rolling is the most popular and is an Easter Monday sport. Hard-boiled eggs are rolled down a hill. Customs differ from place to place. The winner's egg may be the one that rolls the farthest, survives the most rolls, or is rolled between two pegs.

Another activity that happens is the playing of a game with the eggs known as «jarping», which is rather like conkers. Each person holds a pace egg firmly in his hand and knocks it against his opponent's to see which is the strongest and which egg can score the most victims.

Easter cards arrived in Victorian England, when a stationer added a greeting to a drawing of a rabbit. The cards proved popular.

By Mary Brandolino

I was just a little thing

When they brought me from the store

And they put me on the floor

In my cage.

They would take me out to play

Love and pet me all the time

Then at day's end I would climb

In my cage.

But as days and weeks went by

I saw less of them it seemed

Of their loving touch I dreamed

In my cage.

In the night outside their house

I felt sad and so neglected

Often scared and unprotected

In my cage.

In the dry or rainy weather

Sometimes hotter sometimes colder

I just sat there growing older

In my cage.

The cat and dog raced by me

Playing with each other only

While I sat there feeling lonely

In my cage.

Upon the fresh green grass

Children skipped and laughed all day

I could only watch them play

From my cage.

They used to take me out

And let me scamper in the sun

I no longer get to run

In my cage.

Once a cute and cuddly bunny

Like a little ball of cotton

Now I'm grown up and forgotten

In my cage.

I don't know what went wrong

At the home I did inhabit

I just grew to be a rabbit

In my cage.

But they've brought me to the pound

I was once loved and enjoyed

Now I wait to be destroyed

In my cage.

6. Easter Traditions

 

The climax of Lent is Holy Week, the seven days before Easter. It begins on Palm Sunday, commemorating Christ's triumphal ride into Jerusalem, where the populace greeted Him with palm branches. Passion plays are sometimes held to re-enact the suffering and death of the Lord.

To Christian believers, probably the most sombre day of the year is Good Friday, when Tre Ore services (Latin for «three hours») are held to symbolise the three hours Jesus hung on the Cross.

The idea of Easter eggs goes back to the time of ancient Persia and Egypt and was also a part of the culture of the Germanic tribes of Europe. The latter believed that eggs were laid by Easter’s pet hare. The egg was easily taken over by Christian culture to symbolize new life. Just as a chick breaks out of its shell, so too, Jesus emerged from His tomb.

Easter eggs are coloured or otherwise decorated in a wide variety of techniques, including dyeing, painting and etching. The most ornate multicoloured eggs come from Poland's Ukrainian borderlands in the south-east, where designs are applied with molten wax. The egg is dipped in dye, then dried, again decorated with molten wax and immersed in yet another colour bath. This process may be repeated a number of times to create gaily patterned Easter eggs of four or more different colours.

The easiest Easter eggs to make are the solid colour variety. This is the favourite of small children on both sides of the Atlantic, since it suffices to dip a hard-boiled egg into a colour solution for several minutes. Some decorate their eggs with various decals. Those stick-ons that show smurfs, Ninja turtles or Disney characters are more kitchy and commercial than festive, as far as this writer is concerned!

If you were to ask people what a rabbit has to do with Easter, probably few would know the answer, regardless of whether you did the asking in the streets of New York or Warsaw. American youngsters would probably say that the Easter Bunny brings presents the way Santa Claus does at Christmas, but the origin of the custom would be known to almost none of them. That is because the hare has no connection whatsoever with the Christian Feast of Resurrection. The Osterhase (German for the mythical egg-laying hare belonging to the goddess Eostre) was simply adopted by some l9th-century stationer, giving rise to the millions of rabbit-covered Easter cards we see today. In cashing in on this craze, the chocolate factories were not far behind.

The Easter Lamb, shown with a banner of Resurrection, is the Christian adaptation of the sacrificial Paschal Lamb of the Jews. To Christians, the fleecy quadruped was the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, in other words the Redeemer who shed His blood to cleanse mankind of sin. For whatever reason, the chocolate industry is more partial to the Easter Rabbit than the Easter Lamb. In Polish tradition however, it is customary to place a lamb made of sugar, butter or even plastic in the Easter basket that is taken to church to be blessed.