OK, I know there are some strange Easter traditions, but can you beat this one? From an article at Radio Praha:

One prime example of a pagan Czech Easter celebration is the "pomlazka". Farmers used to believe that a strong whipping after the winter period guaranteed health, prosperity, and most importantly a good harvest. This tradition remains to this day, although slightly modified. It is only the women who are given a good spanking with whips made of willow twigs, decorated with colourful ribbons (as if a little bit of decoration would help to ease the pain!). It is mainly younger boys who go from door to door, hoping to thrash a few girls to get some eggs in return, while singing traditional Easter carols.

The whipping or "pomlazka" is to get rid of all the bad things that had accumulated during the winter and bring the vitality back in the ladies, as well as ensure beauty and, of course, fertility. Andrea Fajkusova comes from northern Moravia, where this tradition is still very much alive today: [continue]

And here are directions for braiding the Easter whip. Amazing.

From Scotsman.com: Canterbury hails return of medieval Easter texts.

An 11th century manuscript has been returned to Canterbury Cathedral after going missing for hundreds of years.

The manuscript is a double-page spread from a gospel lectionary, thought to have been written by a highly-skilled scribe from the Holy Roman Empire.

It was discovered in Germany by an academic researching medieval texts, who spotted that the pages matched those in the book of gospels in Canterbury Cathedral.

It is thought the scripts, on the subject of Easter, went missing from the cathedral, like many others, during the mid-16th century Reformation. [continue]

The traditional thing to do on Good Friday (well, besides going to church) is to bake hot cross buns. Need a recipe? Here's the hot cross bun recipe I like best.

From Norway's Criminal Habit Uncovered, a section of the Easter Around the World page at Infoplease.com:

In Norway, reading detective novels and crime thrillers has become a popular Easter pastime. Paaskekrim (Easter crime) refers to the new crime novels available at Easter. The period from Holy Thursday through East Monday is a public holiday, and many Norwegians take vacations to the mountains, or to the coast at this time. According to folklore professors at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the University of Oslo, the tradition of reading about crime at Easter may stem from the violent nature of Christ's death.

Related:
Easter - påskekrimmen - thrillers - cyberclip.com

Here's one interesting tidbit I found while browsing through the faith page on the website of St Mary's Ukrainian Catholic Church:

Palm Sunday
On this day, pussy willows are blessed and distributed to the faithful. The pussy willows symbolize new life.

Pussy willows? Who knew? Catholic Culture's Traditions related to Palm Sunday page explains:

The various names for the Sunday before Easter come from the plants used — palms (Palm Sunday) or branches in general (Branch Sunday, Domingo de Ramos, Dimanche des Rameaux). In most countries of Europe real palms are unobtainable, so in their place people use many other plants: olive branches (in Italy), box, yew, spruce, willows, and pussy willows. In fact, some plants have come to be called "palms" because of this usage, such as the yew in Ireland and the willow in England (palm willow) and in Germany (Palmkätzchen). From the use of willow branches Palm Sunday was called "Willow Sunday" in parts of England and Poland, and in Lithuania Verbu Sekmndienis (Willow Twig Sunday). The Greek Church uses the names "Sunday of the Palm-carrying" and "Hosanna Sunday."

Centuries ago it was customary to bless not only branches but also various flowers of the season (the flowers are still mentioned in the first antiphon of the procession). Hence the name "Flower Sunday," which the day bore in many countries — "Flowering Sunday" or "Blossom Sunday" in England, Blumensonntag in Germany, Pâsques Fleuris in France, Pascua Florida in Spain, Virágvasárnap in Hungary, Cvetna among the Slavic nations, Zaghkasart in Armenia. [continue]

From Radio Praha we have this strange account: Old woman winter- you're not welcome anymore!

I am here at Toulcuv Dvur, it's still winter, there's snow everywhere, there is a cold breeze but the birds are singing. Today we are going to say good-bye to winter. I am spoke to Martina Chvatalova about this ancient tradition:

"We make a puppet called Morena or Marena- it depends on the part of Bohemia where the custom is being practiced. People carry the puppet and while carrying it, they sing a song that is something like, "winter you bad woman, now we are taking you to the river and winter will be over." [continue]

I just had to see if other sites mentioned this custom. My search led me to Czech Easter - Sundays of Lent. The Sundays are: Roast Sunday, Sneezing Sunday, Matchmaker Sunday, Passiontide and Passion Sunday, Death Sunday and the Death of Morena, and Flower (Palm) Sunday. Go read about them all; most interesting.

Related:
Taking out Morena in Orava
Marzanna or Morena - Wikipedia

From Pravda: Faberge jewelry exhibit opens at Moscow's Kremlin.

The Faberge jewelry collection purchased earlier this year by Russian entrepreneur Viktor Vekselberg is now on display at the Patriarch's Chambers of the Moscow Kremlin.

The exhibition, entitled "Faberge: Lost and Recovered," officially opened on Thursday. Patriarch Alexis II of Moscow and All Russia attended the opening ceremony.

The collection on show consists of more than 190 pieces created by Karl Faberge, a famous jeweler with the Russian Imperial House. Its highlights include nine Easter eggs commissioned by Emperors Alexander III and Nicholas II for their spouses, as well as several others that were made for foreign dignitaries, such as Duchess Marlboro's clock egg. Ornamental snuff boxes, cigarette cases, trays, dishes, and frames are also prominent on the collection. [continue]

BBC News has photos of five Fabergé eggs.

Related
Fabergé Eggs: Mementos of a Doomed Dynasty - pbs.org
Fabergé egg - Wikipedia
Faberge: Easter's Most Exquisite Eggs - National Geographic

Here's an explanation of Smigus Dyngus from NewPoland Traditions:

There is one day in the year when the consumption of water in Poland shoots up. This is Easter Monday, and it is due to an ancient custom which is still observed both in villages and cities. It is a delightful tradition, Dyngus or Smigus as this custom is called. There are two versions: one amiable and elegant when it is only a matter of a gentle sprinkling with water or scent, the other quite merciless when whole bucketfuls come into play.

The custom of pouring water is an ancient spring rite of cleansing, purification, and fertility. The pagan Poles bickered with nature — Dingen — by means of pouring water and switching with willows to make themselves pure and worthy of the coming year. Tradition also states that the first Polish ruler Prince Mieszko The First (960-992), along with his court was baptized on Easter Monday in 966.

The first recorded Polish writing on Dyngus dates back to the Middle Ages. A Polish historian wrote of what he called the Oblewania. "It is the universal custom, among the common masses as well as among the distinguished, for men to soak the women on Easter Monday. On Tuesday, and every day thereafter until the time of the Green Holidays — Pentecost — the women doused the men."

Dyngus began somewhat around five in the morning, and the custom demanded that the house where the women slept be secretly invaded. The men crept through a window or through a chimney. Sometimes the male head of the house himself, in collusion with the perpetrators, let the men into the house himself to have his women folk abruptly awakened and doused liberally with water. The spirit of Dyngus is described in this lively description from the Poznan region during 1800s:

"Barely had the day dawned on Easter Monday when I woke the boys and gathered some water to start throwing it on the girls. Up with the Piwezyny! (eiderdown)! There was screaming, shouting, and confusion. The girls are shrieking and hollering, but in their hearts they are glad because they know that she who isn't gotten wet will not be married that year. And the more they are annoyed, the more we dump water on them calling, Dyngus — Smigus! Then we had to change our clothes because there wasn't a dry thread on the girls and we boys were not better off."

Related:
Easter Traditions - warsawvoice.pl
Smigus Dyngus and other Polish old Easter Traditions -bellaonline.com
Dyngus Smigus - ppld.co.uk
Krakow Info - Easter - krakow-info.com

From The Cracking Of The Eggs! at D'Agostino.

Nothing celebrates Easter in a Greek home like the traditional cracking of eggs! In fact, I bet as much excitement is stirred up in Greek households over red hard-boiled Easter eggs as in Western homes over the Easter Bunny. Cries of "Christos Anesti" (Christ is Risen) fill the room, as children and adults alike hit another's egg with their own. (...)

So if your family wants to have a crack at the Kokkina Avga, or red eggs, here's how it goes: You need enough red eggs for each person to have one (recipe below). Seated around the dinner table, egg in hand, each person turns to the one next to him or her, and saying "Christos Anesti," hits that person's egg. The one whose eggs survives the crack turns to the next person and repeats the ritual (that's right, if your egg cracks you're out!). This repeats around the table until only one person's egg remains uncracked.

The hope is to be the possessor of the strongest egg/shell, which, if unbroken wins. There are a few rules: eggs must be struck directly on top, not on the sides; and the pointed end must attack the other's pointed end, or the round end, the round end.

The reward for having the unbroken egg at the end? Good luck for the year… that, and the pride of boasting about your secret way of holding the egg so that it didn't break, pretty much makes you the star of Easter for the rest of the day.

The page includes a recipe, although I'd rather use a food-based dye than the one the recipe mentions.

This afternoon I browsed through a book called Ukrainian Easter Eggs And How We Make Them. It includes directions and designs, and also some information about the tradition and history of making pysanky. This part was particularly interesting:

Before a Ukrainian woman could make pysanky, she was supposed to be in a perfect spiritual state of mind. The previous day was spent peacefully: She would avoid gossip, deal with her family patiently and cook a good dinner.

Pysanky were made at night after the children were asleep. Only women in the family could work together and no one else was allowed to peek, since the purpose of creating pysanky was to transfer goodness from the household to the designs and push away evil. This was a mystical expression and not a social event. The fresh eggs were gathered from hens where a rooster was in residence, for, according to belief, if pysanky were made on non-fertile eggs, there would be no fertility in the home.

The women in the family asked different blessings for each egg, for they felt their good wishes travelled with the pysanka. Special songs were sung quietly, so the souls (dukhe) which were said to inhabit the night, would not be disturbed.

Related:
Pysanky: Ukrainian Easter eggs - Mirabilis.ca, April 8th, 2004.

Today I learned how make Ukrainian Easter eggs, which are called pysanky. The process requires beeswax, pots of dye, a little stylus thingy called a kistka, and some patience. But what fun! Here's how it's done, step by step, and here are more directions. Very, very cool.

If you'd like to make your own pysanka, you'll need some supplies - check out the links below or do a websearch for pysanky supplies in your area. (By the way: pysanka is singular, and pysanky is plural.)

And oh! If you live in Vancouver you can do what I did, and take a Baba's Beeswax pysanky workshop.

Related:
UkrainianEgg.com (Watch as initial graphic changes.)
The traditional Ukrainian Egg
Psanky Eggs - Ukrainian Egg Dyeing
Psankyshowcase.com

Pysanky supplies available through:
UkrainianEgg.com - supplies made in BC
Ukrainian Egg Art Supplies - Nova Scotia
TerenCanada.com
Baba's Beeswax Richmond, BC
Ukrainian Giftshop - Minnesota, USA

From The Guardian: Holy week around the world. 8 snapshots.

From the Toronto Star: Trying to go with the slow.

An egg is never just an egg, especially at this time of year. It is a symbol in an edible oval package.

The egg is linked to the budding of spring. On the Passover table, a roasted egg represents a ritual offering and rebirth. At Easter, children play with brightly decorated eggs, oblivious they are participating in a tradition that traces back to a time when early Christians dyed eggs red to symbolize the blood of Christ. (...)

Paula Wolfert takes a keen interest in slow eggs. She explores their nature in her latest book, The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen: Recipes For The Passionate Cook (John Wiley & Sons, $53.95, 2003).

Wolfert's Sephardic Oven-Roasted Eggs mimic an old Mediterranean tradition of burying eggs overnight in the ashes of a dying fire. Drops of albumen seep from the shell and blacken, hinting of the subtle smoky flavour within. Peeled, the eggs are tea-coloured, with mottling and, sometimes, darker veins of colour.

But slow doesn't necessarily mean better.

For Huevos Haminados, a Sephardic Passover specialty, eggs are simmered up to 12 hours in a bath with red onion skins or Turkish coffee grounds. Wolfert re-creates this in a slow cooker, adding to the water handfuls of dried red onion skins, olive oil, sea salt and ground cumin. She keeps the lid off to lower the temperature.

Curious, I try it. [continue]

The article includes many interesting tidbits about eggs, and some recipes, too. You must at least go see the photo of the mabled tea eggs.

Related book:
The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen : Recipes for the Passionate Cook

Ad Altare Dei explains why the first Sunday after Easter is called Quasimodo Sunday, and also why the Hunchback of Notre Dame was named Quasimodo:

Yesterday. the first Sunday after Easter, is traditionally known, primarily in France and other parts of Europe, as "Quasimodo Sunday" because of the beginning words of the Introit which come from 1 Peter 2:2,3: Quasi modo geniti infantes, rationabile, sine dolo lac concupiscite ut in eo crescatis in salutem si gustastis quoniam dulcis Dominus, which in English is: As newborn babes, desire the rational milk without guile, that thereby you may grow unto salvation: If so be you have tasted that the Lord is sweet. It is used in the context of this particular Sunday to refer to the newly baptized at Easter as well as applying generally to all of us. (...)

Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame

"Sixteen years previous to the epoch when this story takes place, one fine morning, on Quasimodo Sunday, a living creature had been deposited, after mass, in the church of Notre- Dame, on the wooden bed securely fixed in the vestibule on the left, opposite that great image of Saint Christopher, which the figure of Messire Antoine des Essarts, chevalier, carved in stone, had been gazing at on his knees since 1413, when they took it into their heads to overthrow the saint and the faithful follower. Upon this bed of wood it was customary to expose foundlings for public charity. Whoever cared to take them did so. In front of the wooden bed was a copper basin for alms. The sort of living being which lay upon that plank on the morning of Quasimodo, in the year of the Lord, 1467, appeared to excite to a high degree, the curiosity of the numerous group which had congregated about the wooden bed."
-4th Book, Chapter 1.

I first read Hunchback in the 10th grade, and it has always been one of my favorite books, and now that I understand the Easter connection better, I can understand the figure of the Hunchback, named after the Sunday on which he was found, much better than I did then. Victor Hugo's story is a tale of redemption in the face of corruption, the sublime versus the grotesque. While the world prided itself on being beautiful on the outside, yet was bitter and ugly on the inside, only Quasimodo, the disfigured hunchback in Hugo's story, understood the value, and the pain, of being inwardly transformed in the innocent loving of others.

(Link found at Dappled Things.)

Related links:
Low Sunday/Quasimodo Sunday - from the Catholic Encyclopedia

Related book:

The Hunchback of Notre Dame - online version from literaturepage.com

The Hunchback of Notre Dame - online version from Project Gutenberg (This plain text version is perfect if you want use something like Plucker or iSilo to put the book on your Palm Pilot)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame - paperback, available at Amazon.com

Here's another article about St Matthew's monastery in Iraq:

The two elderly Assyrian Christians do not expect a big turnout at one of the world's oldest monasteries on Mount Maqloub, northeast of Mosul, for the most important Christian festival. The Orthodox church celebrates Easter a week later than Catholics and Protestants.

In fact, the black-cloaked clerics may well be celebrating Easter alone in the small chapel at St. Matthew monastery, just as they do on many other Sundays and feast days at one of Iraq's most important Christian sites dating back to 363 AD.

"We are looking forward to Easter when we can preach a message of peace all over Iraq," said the small, jovial Adda as he rubbed the gold and jewelled cross hanging on his chest. [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca entry:
View from an Iraqi monastery

Happy Easter! From the Paschal Greeting page at monachos.net:

During the season of Pascha (through to the feast of the Leavetaking of Pascha, the day before the Ascension), it is traditional to greet the faithful with a joyful 'Christ is Risen!', to which the other party responds, 'Indeed, He is risen!' Below are transliterations of this Paschal greeting into 58 languages.

When I first posted this article, I wrote:

If you happen to have a really excellent hot cross bun recipe, would you please send it to me? I'll be baking on Friday.

I know there are a zillion hot cross bun recipes on the web and in various cookbooks; I already have some of those. What I'm after are recipes you can vouch for because you've tried them yourself and loved the results. Or your mom's recipe, say. Anybody?

Now the update is this:

I found a fantastic recipe for hot cross buns. Yum! This is the recipe we'll be using every Easter from now on.

Mmm, I love reading about the history of food. Today the Beacon Journal offers a look at food and abstinence during Lent across the centuries.

In popular culinary parlance, people who exclude meat, eggs and dairy products from their diet are called vegans. But this form of vegetarianism is hardly new.

Nearly 1,400 years ago, Pope Gregory the Great mandated that all Christian faithful follow a strict dietary code as penance for their sins during Lent. "We abstain from flesh meat and from all things that come from flesh, as milk, cheese, butter and eggs," Gregory wrote.

For 40 days, fish became the mainstay of everyone's diet and, in places where fresh fish was not available, dried salted fish, especially cod and herring, was used.

As you can imagine, a constant diet of salted fish became boring after just a few weeks, but it was not the fish eaters who suffered most from the imposed diet. Butchers were the real victims. In fact, on Easter Sunday in Ireland, butchers and their apprentices organized boisterous herring funerals to celebrate the return of meat.

Preparing appetizing meals without the forbidden foods was a challenge, and every ethnic group developed its own Lenten meals. [continue]

Kathryn Carpenter wrote to the Mercury News to explain what she's giving up for Lent this year. She writes:

Lent is about to start, you know, that period of 40 days and 40 nights before Easter. It begins Wednesday and for many Catholics it is a time to give up something, in order to bring one closer to God. Traditionally people give up vices, such as ice cream, candy, gum, maybe even smoking. It is supposed to teach self-sacrifice and put one in solidarity with those less fortunate.

And so what's Kathryn giving up for Lent, you ask? Speeding.

It isn't easy. I have to practice a few days ahead of time. I can't just stop speeding overnight. And, I don't start speeding the day after Easter, only gradually going back to old habits.