No sooner have the Christmas decorations gone down, then Valentine’s hearts appear, and once everyone is loved out, the bunny, the egg and the hot cross bun enter the scene. Easter falls on March 31 this year and Helen Raine believes there is enough time to embrace the handicrafts, traditions and activities that surround the holiest of Christian festivals – US style.
Americans live from one holiday to another. No sooner have the Christmas decorations gone down, then Valentine’s hearts appear, and once everyone is loved out, the bunny, the egg and the hot cross bun enter the scene. No matter what the misty origins of the holiday might be (and many Easter traditions have distinctly pagan roots), their modern incarnations are fully embraced. Houses are decked out, kids make crafts and food is cooked in extravagant portions.
After finding each egg, tell the kids they need to do 20 jumping jacks before moving to the next one
Easter traditions were shipped to the US with the waves of immigrants. Some survived the journey intact, some got a bit warped on the way and different cities developed their own unique ways of celebrating. Easter falls on March 31 this year. Here’s how to do this most holy of Christian festivals US style.
Dozens of eggs
Easter used to be about fertility. Spring had sprung, flowers were blooming, animals were mating and our ancient ancestors wanted to make sure the coming year was a productive one as they emerged from winter. Dying and eating eggs during spring festivals has been around since the Pharaohs of Egypt and probably before. Early Christians grafted their celebration of the resurrection onto the old traditions, but many of the old customs stuck. Thus, modern Americans still dye hard-boiled eggs (Pennsylvania Dutch-German settlers brought these customs with them in the early 1700s).
How to do it US style: Dye an egg (supervise children at all times during this activity and help with the parts that involve a burn risk). Hard boil your eggs, then light a candle.
Cut some strips of crepe paper and put them in a bowl of hot water to release the dye from the paper. Use different bowls for different coloured papers.
Remove the paper from the bowl (leaving just the coloured water behind).
Add a tablespoon of white vinegar to the coloured water. Allow the water to cool.
Drip the candle wax onto the eggs in the pattern you want (use very little wax this first time).
Dip the egg into the lightest colour dye first. Dry the egg with a paper towel.
Add more wax onto the egg, cool and dip the egg into the next bowl of dye (you can leave the egg sitting in the water for a deeper shade). Repeat until you have used all the colours.
Place the egg in a warm oven on a tray. The wax will melt in about two minutes. Wipe it off with another paper towel.
You can also use fresh blown eggs for this activity, so that they can be kept indefinitely and hung on an Easter tree.
Easter tree
Katherine Milhous’s book Egg Tree popularised the idea of decorating a tree with eggs in the US. It’s a story about Easter in which the heroine finds eggs her own grandmother painted as a child hung from the branches of a tiny tree in the attic. Many Americans place a branch in their window with decorated eggs hung from it, although in the Pennsylvania Dutch region of the US, entire trees might be decorated outdoors to brilliant effect.
How to do it US style: Fill a plant pot with foam from the flower shop and insert branches into it.
Prepare the fresh eggs by putting a hole in both ends with a needle, then enlarge the hole slightly and break the yolk.
Blow out the contents by mouth or by using an ear syringe (you can get one at the chemist) to force the yoke and white out of the larger hole; you can cook with the egg’s contents.
After decorating the eggs (perhaps using the candle drip process), use a needle with a large eye to pull a ribbon through the egg so that you can hang it. Knot the end of the ribbon to stop it slipping through.
Easter egg rolls
The White House has been hosting an Easter egg roll for 135 years. Tickets are allocated by a lottery system, which opens about a month before Easter and around 35,000 people are expected to attend. Events include games, stories and the traditional egg roll in which kids armed with serving spoons attempt to shepherd their coloured eggs down the hill fastest. There are souvenir eggs with the White House stamp up for grabs (this year, the first dog’s paw print is included) and the likes of Justin Bieber have played in the past.
The tradition of egg rolling is said to symbolise the rolling of the stone outside Christ’s tomb, but before that, egg rolling came from the Saxons and their spring goddess Eostre. Her animal was the hare (hence the Easter bunny) and the rebirth of spring was symbolised by an egg, which children traditionally rolled down a hill. When European settlers came to the New World, they brought the new Christian version of Eostre’s egg-rolling festival with them.
How to do it US style: Find a large hill (preferably grassy; perhaps somewhere in Buskett would do, since it’s in the vicinity of the Presidential Palace), a collection of children who need to burn off some energy, a bag of chocolate eggs, some long handled spoons and tape for the finishing line and voila! They’ll be busy for at least half an hour.
Easter egg hunt
This tradition also originated in Germany, where a white hare spends the night before Easter hopping around hiding eggs. In an American twist, eggs are hidden around the Miami Zoo and hundreds of children can find them between exhibits of exotic animals. Even the animals get in on the fun, with food treats hidden around their cages.
How to do it US style: America, like Malta, suffers from high levels of childhood obesity. US News makes some inventive suggestions to cut down the sugar overload of an Easter egg hunt. They even suggest planting carrots for the bunny instead of finding eggs, but that might be stretching it a bit. These ideas will probably be a bit more popular... Just don’t follow the example of the Georgia hunt last year, which had to be cancelled after pushy parents injured children in a bid to amass the most eggs.
Hide toys, such as colouring books or crayons to put in their baskets, rather than just sweets.
Provide fruit covered in chocolate instead of chocolate eggs.
Add some serious exercise into the hunt itself, such as a relay race, sprints, leapfrog and, of course, bunny hops.
After finding each egg, tell the kids they need to do 20 jumping jacks beforemoving to the next one.
The Easter bunny
The Easter bunny was another stowaway with the German settlers. These days, one of its most popular incarnations is on the Easter Express in Santa Fe. The Southern Railway takes passengers through the stunning scenery of the area and the bunny jumps aboard with its basket of treats.
How to do it US style: With no railway in Malta, you’ll have to improvise by making your own bunny and carriages.
Start with a toilet roll and get your child to paint it and draw on the eyes, nose and bunny whiskers.
Cut out two long ears from cardboard, colour them in and glue them to the inside of the toilet roll, sticking out of the top. Glue a cotton ball to the back as the tail.
You need to add a base, so cut a circle of cardboard as well as two bunny feet. Glue the feet so that they stick out from the base; then glue the base to the bottom of the toilet roll.
Fill the inside of the bunny roll with chocolate treats.
Use cardboard boxes to emulate the train carriages and use the bunnies as passengers.
Easter parades
In the 1700s, people used to celebrate Easter by wearing floral wreaths, and gradually this morphed into Easter bonnets. Today, the fashionistas have appropriated the bonnet, and in New York, they take to Fifth Avenue in their Easter finery (in days gone by, the rich used to parade down the Avenue after church at Easter showing off their fine clothes).
Now, the street is closed to traffic as a riot of coloured millinery struts down it. Top hats are laden with jelly beans, bonnets brim with everything from butterflies in feather nests to entire farms with eggs to boot. In between, there are some seriously high fashion hats making an outing.
How to do it US style: Make an Easter bonnet. Draw a large circle on cardboard and cut it out.
Use a paper bowl to draw a second circle in the middle then cut it out, but make the cut-out slightly smaller than the bowl circumference.
Insert the paper bowl into the circle so that the bowl forms the hat and the cardboard forms the rim.
Glue the joins. Now paint the hat and the brim.
To add some Easter flowers, paint some coffee filters in bright colours. Once they are dry, scrunch them to a point in the middle, then glue the point to the hat.
Easter food
At Easter, the focus is very much on baked ham, potatoes and vegetables, a feast after the famine of winter. Devilled eggs are also popular. Hot cross buns are big as well as Peeps, small marshmallow sweets shaped like chickens.
How to do it US style: Eggs for adults. To make devilled eggs, hard boil six eggs. Peel the eggs and remove the yolks. Mix the yolk with three tablespoons of mayonnaise and a teaspoon of curry powder.
Put the mixture back into the white of the egg, sprinkle with paprika, chill and enjoy.