Easter Traditions

Have you ever wondered why Easter’s Day is on a different date every year?  Well, many years ago the Church decided that Easter Day would always fall on the Sunday following the first full moon after the first day of Spring (21^st March).  This meant that Easter could be as early as 22^nd March or as late as 25^th April on any given year in the West, such as in UK, America, etc., where the Gregorian calendar is used; in the East, where the Julian calendar is adopted, Easter could be as late as May.

Easter is the most important of the Christian religious festivals.

Long before Christianity people in Europe worshipped the Goddess of Spring, 'Eostre'.  They believed that the Sun died in winter and was re-born again in Spring (easy to believe in UK and some Nordic countries!).  They thought that Eostre brought back Spring and that it would encourage the Sun to get stronger.  Some believe that Easter’s name derives from this Goddess.
In most countries though, Easter is called a variation of Pasch (Passover), which remains the name most used in non-English language countries.

Easter is preceded by a period of abstinence – Lent.  Historically, before Lent began, eggs - as well as other rich food - would be eaten in every household before Lent began.   This accounts for Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) or Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day) the day before Ash Wednesday, the day which Lent officially begins.  Both in Western and Eastern Christianity, eggs, meat and dairy products were prohibited during Lent.  Pancake Day originated by the need to use all the eggs in the household before the period of Lent began.

In the Orthodox Church, Lent begins on a Monday, rather than on a Wednesday, to give more time to use up all the ingredients in the house before Lent.  As chickens could not be stopped from laying eggs during Lent – and in the old days it would have been difficult to store eggs for as long as 40 days – any egg that did not hatch would be preserved by being boiled to lengthen its edible life.  This has confirmation in the many recipes containing hard boiled eggs or eggs in general as a main ingredient, that are found in many countries (i.e. Spain-Hornazo, Hungary, etc.) as typical Easter’s recipes.

With the arrival of Easter, eggs could be eaten again.

Before Christianity, giving eggs at Easter was associated with the celebration of new life as well as a practical gesture - as 40 days without eating eggs must have left households with an excess of them and they would have been particularly welcome by people without chickens as well as not eaten eggs throughout Lent.  The egg is traditionally associated as a symbol of fertility and rebirth.  Eggs were thought to be special because although they do not seem alive, they have life within them, especially when chicks hatch out at springtime.

The tradition may also have merged into the celebrations after Lent.  It seems that the custom of Easter eggs originated in Mesopotamia.  And that the Christian Church officially adopted the custom of regarding eggs as a symbol of the resurrection, in 1610.

Parallels between Christianity and the celebration of Passover in Judaism are also notable because of Christ celebrating Passover with his disciples on the evening before Good Friday.

In addition, eggs have been viewed as symbols of new life and fertility through the ages. It is believed that for this reason many ancient cultures, including the ancient Egyptians, Persians and Romans, used eggs during their Spring festivals.  Slowly the tradition of giving eggs developed into a tradition of giving gifts of eggs carved from wood, precious stones, etc.   

Decoration and symbolism

In the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Church, Easter eggs are dyed red to represent the blood of Christ.  Easter eggs are blessed by the priests at the end of the Vigil (the Saturday before Easter Sunday) and distributed among the presents.

Easter eggs are a widely popular symbol of new life in Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, etc.).  Eggs are decorated by using a batik process which is used to create intricate, brilliantly coloured eggs.  The best-known are the pysanka or pisanka from Ukraine and Poland (see further on).
An example of intricately decorated eggs are the Fabergé eggs.  Be-jewelled eggs created for the Imperial Russian Court at Easter.  Most of these creations contained hidden surprises such as clockwork birds, miniature ships, etc. 

Easy to see how the custom to give an egg at Easter has developed into the Easter egg of nowadays.

When boiling eggs for Easter, a popular tan colour was achieved by boiling the eggs with onion skins. A greater variety of colours was often provided by tying the onion skin to the egg with different coloured yarns.  In Northern England these eggs are called pace-eggs or paste-eggs, which derive from the middle-age English: ‘pasche’.

The first sweet eggs to be eaten, were created in the last 100 years, and were made from sugar or marzipan. Since then chocolate eggs have become popular and these are now mainly given on Easter Sunday.
Nowadays around 80 million of chocolate eggs are eaten in Britain each year.

Pysanka or pisanka

 

Pysanka Eggs

The pysanka is an Ukrainian Easter egg, decorated using a batik method with wax.  The word comes from the verb ‘pysaty’ - to write. The designs were written on the eggs with beeswax.

In Ukraine pysanka are typically made to be given to family members. Giving a pysanka is to give a gift of life, and for this reason the egg must remain whole.  Each designs and colour applied to the pysanka has a symbolic meaning and traditionally the designs were chosen to match the character of the person that would receive the pysanka.

Origins of colouring eggs at Easter in England

Decorating and colouring eggs for Easter was a common custom in England in the middle ages. Eggs were brightly coloured to mimic the fresh colours of Spring. The practice of decorating eggs was made even more popular when King Edward I ordered 450 eggs to be covered in gold-leaf and coloured as Easter gifts in 1290.

Easter egg traditions

"Egg tapping", "Egg rolling", "Egg dance" are some of the names of games played with eggs at Easter in different nations across the globe.

In the Mediterranean countries, chicken eggs are boiled and decorated with dye and / or paint and used as decoration around the house or to create Easter trees.  In some countries on Easter Sunday there is also the traditional egg hunt, where eggs are hidden outdoors (or indoors if the weather is bad) for children to run around and find them.

Easter eggs for the visually impaired (I like this)

It seems that since 2008 the 'International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators' have sponsored a charity in US to build Easter eggs for visually impaired children. Each year beeping Easter eggs are built emitting various clicks and noises that visually impaired children can easily find when hunting for Easter eggs.

 

The Easter Bunny

Symbols

In the legend, the bunny or rabbit / hare carries coloured eggs in his basket to the homes of children, a little bit like Father Christmas. It was first mentioned in a book 'About Easter Eggs' in 1682. [ "De ovis paschalibus" of Georg Franck von Frankenau.].

The hare was a popular motif in medieval Christian art.

In ancient times it was widely believed (Pliny, Plutarch among others) that the hare was a hermaphrodite (an organism that has reproductive organs normally associated with both male and female).  The idea was that a hare could reproduce without loss of its virginity, led to an association with the Virgin Mary.

Eggs, like rabbits and hares, were fertility symbols in antiquity.  As birds lay eggs and rabbits / hares give birth to large litters in the early spring, these became symbols of the fertility of the Earth at the time of the March equinox.

Mother’s Day, Mothering Sunday, Mothers Day...you name it (Part 1)

Mother’s Day, Mothering Sunday, Mothers Day there is enough to confuse the best of us. And why is it celebrated on different days of the year and not on the same day everywhere in the world? As Mother’s Day is fast approaching again this year – 10th March – let’s discover its history, traditions and do on around the globe. Let’s start form our doorstep: UK.

Mothering Sunday vs. Mother's Day

Nowadays Mothering Sunday is often called Mother's Day in UK and it is regarded as synonymous with Mother's Day, as celebrated in other countries around the world, although many still prefer the more historically accurate ‘Mothering Sunday’.

Mother’s Day - History

The history of Mother's Day goes back many centuries – as far as the Egyptians. Early Christians celebrated the Mother's festival on the fourth Sunday of Lent to honour Mary, the mother of Christ. Later on, a religious order included the celebration of all mothers and named it as the Mothering Sunday.

Spiritual Origins of Mothers Day

The practice of honouring Motherhood is rooted in antiquity, and past rites had strong symbolic and spiritual tones and tended to celebrate Goddesses as the symbol of Mothers. The maternal objects of adoration ranged from mythological female deities to the Christian Church itself. Only in the past few centuries did celebrations of Motherhood develop a decidedly human focus. This human aspect to Mother’s Day is relatively new.

One of the earliest historical records of celebrating a ‘Mother’ deity can be found among the ancient Egyptians, who held an annual festival to honour the goddess Isis, who was commonly regarded as the Mother of the pharaohs. The festival of Isis was also celebrated by the Romans who used the event to commemorate an important battle and mark the beginning of the Winter. Despite being an imported deity, Isis held a place at the Roman temple. However the root in the Roman’s Mother’s Day is perhaps found more precisely in the celebration of the goddess Cybele, or Magna Mater (the Great Mother). Cybele derives from the Greek Goddess Rhea, who was the Mother of most of the major deities, including Zeus. Rhea was celebrated as a mother goddess, and her festival took place around the time of the Vernal Equinox (Spring equinox). In Rome and Asia Minor (Roman Empire), Cybele was the major Mother deity similarly to Rhea, the mother of the Gods in Greek culture. The Roman celebration of Cybele or Magna Mater fell around the 15 and 22 of March, at a similar time the Greek would have celebrated Rhea.

Modern times celebrations

Another holiday / festival to celebrate and honour Motherhood came from Europe. It fell on the 4th Sunday of Lent (the 40 days of fasting preceding Easter Sunday). Early Christians initially used this day to honour the church in which they were baptized, and that they saw as their ‘Mother Church’.

In the 1600's a decree in England broadened the celebration to include all real Mothers and referred to the day as Mothering Day. During this day - Lenten Sunday - servants and trade workers were allowed to travel back to their towns of origin to visit their families. Mothering Day also provided a one-day reprieve from the fasting and penance of Lent so that families across England could enjoy a family feast and represented a day where mothers were the main guest of honour. Mothers would be presented with cakes and flowers and overall mothers would get to see their distant children.

Mothering Day or Mothering Sunday in United Kingdom and Ireland

Early Christians in England celebrated the Mother's festival on the 4th Sunday of Lent to honour Mary, the mother of Christ. In the 16th century people working out of their homes were expected to return to the "mother" church (the spiritual power that gave them life and protected them from any harm).

In the United Kingdom and Ireland, this celebration is known as Mothering Sunday. The practice of visiting one's ‘mother’ church every year on the Lenten Sunday, meant that most mothers would be reunited with their children as young apprentices and young women in service were released by their masters to make the journey home that weekend to go visit their families.

In some Church of England churches, this day is the only day during Lent when marriages can be celebrated.

In the early 1900s (1935), the practice of celebrating Mothering Sunday fell into disuse. However, after the 2nd World War the tradition started to be revived, partly inspired by efforts made to revive the festival in the 1910s–1920s; it wasn't until after World War II when American soldiers brought Mother's Day celebrations to the UK and they were incorporated with the tradition of Mothering Sunday which was still being celebrated by the Church of England. In the 1950s the celebrations started gathering memento as were seen as a great commercial opportunity.

Irish and British people started to celebrate Mother's Day on the 4th Sunday of Lent, the same day on which Mothering Sunday had been celebrated for centuries before. Some of the old Mothering Sunday’s traditions were revived, such as the tradition of eating cake on that day, although nowadays Simnel cake is eaten instead of traditional cakes eaten in the olden days. The two celebrations have now mixed up and many people think that they are the same thing.

Recently the day was dubbed ‘Mother's Day’ or ‘Mothers' Day’ however sometimes ‘Mothers Day’ is also used.

Mothering Sunday, also known as...

Other names attributed to the festival of Mothering Day were: Refreshment Sunday, Mid-Lent Sunday, Simnel Sunday and Rose Sunday. Simnel Sunday as baking Simnel Cakes to celebrate the reunion of families during Lent. Rose Sunday is sometimes used as an alternative title for Laetare Sunday, as witnessed by the purple robes of Lent being replaced by rose-coloured ones in some churches.

Simnel Cake – Facts

Nowadays the Simnel cake is strongly associated with this holiday. It was also that Simnel Cakes became associated with Mothering Sunday as young servants/maids were allowed to bake a cake to take home to their mother as a gift. Fruit cakes known as "Simnel Cakes" became one of the most common gifts on Mothering Sundays;

• Around 1600, when the celebration was only held in England and Scotland, a different kind of pastry was preferred;
• In England they served a cake called "Mothering Sunday Buns" with raisin and butter icing;
• In Northern England and Scotland some preferred "Carlings", a pancake made of steeped peas fried in butter.

As with most Mothering Sunday customs and traditions, the Simnel Cake has also a religious flavour: on top of the cake are placed 11 marzipan balls, signifying 11 of the 12 apostles of Christ, excluding the notorious apostle Judas, who had betrayed Jesus.