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Eastern Eggs are boiled and painted on Saturday morning, taken to church to be blessed, and eaten on Sunday for breakfast.
Posts: 5700 | Registered: Feb 2002
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Yeah, in our family, they're boiled and cooled whenever mom has time (this year, not until this morning), decorated as a family activity whenever everyone can be together for it (this year, tonight; in the past, when I was growing up, Fri. night sometimes), then, after they dry, kept in the fridge until the Easter Egg hunt (they're not hidden until right before they're searched, so that no one's egg goes bad. If it's rainy or very hot, the hunt takes place indoors.) No blessings involved, and our rules are:
No one must decorate an egg for himself/herself.
A list is made of everyone who will be attending, whether searching or not, and one egg is decorated for each of them. Several extras are decorated as well.
After the hunt, the winner is the person with the most eggs in her/his basket. However, any egg with a name on it is given to the person whose name it bears, and anyone who arrived unexpectedly and does not have one gets to choose an egg or two from the non-name-bearing eggs. After the egg-admiring, all eggs are immediately put in the fridge to be safe from food poisoning until it's time to go home.
That way, we were never stuck with a whole dozen hard-boiled eggs while my sisters each had two eggs with their names on it but a cousin had none. It's fun.
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We always did any "secular" celebrating (bunnies, candy, eggs, hunts, whatever) on the Saturday before Easter. Easter Sunday itself was focused on the actual story of Easter.
Of course there is also usually a large family gathering featuring a ham-feast. Posts: 7050 | Registered: Feb 2004
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Kama, that's really interesting. I'd never heard of priests blessing Easter eggs before. Dag (or others who are or have been US Catholics) is that done in the US?
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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It's not just eggs that are blessed. You prepare a basket with food: bread, salt, meat (sausage or ham), eggs, horseradish (no idea why), traditionally also some sweets (sugar lambs). Then, on Easter Sunday, you share the food with family.
Bread is for the bread Christ shared with his disciples; meat is the symbol for the Lamb of God; eggs are the new life.
I think it is a Polish only tradition. I'm not sure about Russian orthodox, I have a vague memory of them doing it as well.
Posts: 5700 | Registered: Feb 2002
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Horseradish seems to be a passover thing too We sometimes get new clothes on easter. And easter candy. I've been trying to tell my kids that if they don't clean the livingroom, the buuny won't bring them anything. My husband is really into bunnies and santas and fairies, but I think since I'm just going along with it I tend to mess it up. Posts: 2010 | Registered: Apr 2003
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I've only been to one seder, but I seem to remember a part of the litany included bitter herbs, and it symbolized the bitterness of slavery in Egypt.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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I found an old easter egg coloring kit. It just has 2 colors left. Maybe I'll go buy some eggs and boil them tonite and color them on Sunday. That would be fun. Kind of late, I know, but hey. I love coloring Easter Eggs.
Posts: 1990 | Registered: Feb 2001
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Oh, this is just a simple kit. All the stupid stickers and so on have already been thrown out. But it doesn't even need vinegar, which is nice, because I haven't got any. Just the color tablet and warm water. I think one year I used pickle juice out of desperation. That worked pretty well, I think.
How much food coloring does it take to make it with vinagar, anyway? My mom never told me food coloring would work so we always bought the kits.
Posts: 1990 | Registered: Feb 2001
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Kama, it is mainly a polish thing... The Polish Catholic churches around my area do it. (My grandmother was polish and so tradition is for us to bring food to be blessed). Priests who are not Polish will do it as well if you ask them Posts: 944 | Registered: Jun 2001
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The more food color you put in, the stronger your color will be. So it's up to you. I know that the McCormick boxes of 4 colors that we normally buy do have "use this many drops of these colors to make these other colors", so you could use that as a guide if you have a box with those kind of markings. Otherwise, I'd say trial and error. (I'd transcribe what mine says but at some point it got soaked in red dye and is currently unreadable.)
Posts: 4515 | Registered: Jul 2004
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It's 1 tsp. white vinegar to 1/2 cup boiling water, with 20 drops food coloring for fairly deep dyes, less for pastels, although you want to use 30 or 35 for a good deep red dye, otherwise it's just dark pink. For mixed colors, generally mix between 15 and 17 drops of a lighter color with 3 to 5 of the darker to get the secondary colors. We always try purple, and neither by using the mix suggested on the box nor by tinkering with it do you get a nice purple dye; I think I'm going to give up on making it. It always turns grey. It's better just to dye red, then blue; that usually results in a very nice purple egg.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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That sounds like fun. I'll have to try it next year. I'm moving in a week, so I certainly don't want to buy any food coloring or vinegar this year.
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I just realized. I don't even know how long it takes to boil an egg! I'm guessing ten minutes.
Posts: 1990 | Registered: Feb 2001
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quote:I just realized. I don't even know how long it takes to boil an egg! I'm guessing ten minutes.
The best way I've found is to cover the eggs with cold water - about enough to cover them by at least 3 inches.
Place the pot on the stove and turn on high. As soon as it starts boiling, turn it off but leave on the burner until it cools. Very good for avoiding cracks in the eggs.
So, what are you saying, then, Bob, that the Jewish religion is soft? That Buddhism is overly easy? Islam, scrambled?
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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Eggs are $0.50 a dozen at Target, if you have a Target Super near you. And this is how I did it: lightly salted cold water to cover plus a little extra, bring just to a boil, remove from heat, let stand covered 20 minutes, remove eggs to bowl of cold water (my mom runs cold water over them in the sink in a colander), then, when mostly cool, set in egg carton to dry. When completely cooled, refrigerate until ready to dye. I didn't have one cracked egg. My mom always said you never boil an egg; they're hard-cooked, not really hard-boiled. She doesn't like the way they taste when you hard-boil them.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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Heh. Don't panic! I am a student living in residence, with a meal-plan . Any extra food I need I use the communal microwave, fridge or oven .
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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Yeah, right! I'm lucky if I can get eggs for $2.50 a dozen at any time.
Also, KQ, I found it odd that you wouldn't want a "whole dozen" colored eggs in your refrigerator after Easter. When I was a child, we had so much fun coloring eggs that we would always do 5 or 6 dozen every year. And we always ate them all (or my mother would never have let us do so many). We would certainly be sick of hard boiled eggs after about a week, but I don't remember any of us (there were three children in my family) complaining.
As a parent, I let my 6 children decorate 3 or 4 dozen eggs (this was obviously before I moved to Hawaii where eggs are so expensive). They didn't enjoy it as much as I did, and I wasn't as tolerant of the mess as my mother was, so after a while, I started filling plastic eggs for the Easter egg hunts and skipping the coloring all together. Also, only one of my children would eat hard boiled eggs, so there was that issue too.
Posts: 2069 | Registered: May 2001
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We sometimes get new clothes on easter. And easter candy. I've been trying to tell my kids that if they don't clean the livingroom, the buuny won't bring them anything. My husband is really into bunnies and santas and fairies, but I think since I'm just going along with it I tend to mess it up. ![[Evil]](graemlins/evil.gif)
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