Easter Eggs
It's Easter next Sunday, so tomorrow night, in houses all over Romania, women will be painting eggs. You can read about painting techniques in the magazine, but I'm going to tell you about what happens to the eggs during the next days: they are "knocked" against each other during the meals that take place these days, by the family and friends.
This is done following a very precise ceremony. Each egg has three parts: the head, the bottom and the side. You never knock different parts. Before the actual knocking, the two persons who are doing it say a special formula about the Resurrection of Christ. The first to do it is usually the oldest man in the family.
Seems like a bit violent tradition for such a holiday. Actually, it's a lot of fun especially for children, who make a contest of it and try to pick the "champion" egg and even to cheat using a wooden egg. These are nice moments to share with the whole family.
Do you have anything similar?
2 comments:
I forgot one important thing about this tradition: the belief is that those who do this egg-knocking would meet again in the afterworld. Comforting thought.
Who knows?
We don't have this tradition. When I was a child, I hadn't heard about it.
But my mother says they use to paint eggs for Easter. So, perhaps it got lost with the time and then it has come back as a foreign habit, but we don't paint the eggs, we just buy chocolate eggs.
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