Easter Eggs

Easter Eggs were early in the shops this year. Lent hadn't even started when I spotted the boxes piled almost ceiling high. What a dazzling selection there is! Cadbury's plain chocolate, Tiffin, Mars, Maltesers, Buttons, Smarties and many more.




Easter Eggs did not mean chocolate at all in my schooldays. Easter Eggs were just ordinary hen eggs at Easter time after the forty fasting days of Lent when the consumption of eggs dropped in line with the religious restrictions then in vogue. There was usually a competition among my classmates as to who would eat most eggs on Easter Sunday. The count began at breakfast when the cooking method depended on the frying pan. The trick was to puncture the yolk and fry the egg hard and one could clock up maybe four or five in this way. On to Mass and the boasting began there. Now who is telling the truth and who is the bluffer? How many have I to catch up on during the remainder of the day? Easter weather then , if I remember correctly, was dry and crisp and sunny. The year I was in sixth class, I had arranged an egg-picnic with my neighbours. We kindled a fire of winter windfall wood, filled a billy-can with water and put on a batch of eggs. As at breakfast, the harder the eggs were boiled the easier it was to digest them. You'd be doing well to down four of five again. By now you wouldn't want to see another ovoid for a long time. However, when suppertime came and doubts set in as to whether you could claim victory at school the following day, you would order another egg or two against your better judgement. By some amazing feat of will-power you would manage to get them down. With a clear conscience you would claim the full dozen and it would take a first class bluffer to beat that.


Poaching and omelettes were not words in our vocabulary at that time.

Girls, of course, did not engage in this barbaric practice. Their competition was to see who could decorate the eggshell most colourfully. This was a perilous process because your time and trouble might be in vain if the colouring material failed to survive the cooking process.














Where does the custom of the Easter Egg come from at all? It is indeed an old tradition and possibly derives from the connection with the egg as the beginning of new life and Easter typifying the regrowth of nature in the new year. For some, the egg is seen as the symbol of the grave and the cracking of the shell denotes the renewal of life and the resurrection at Easter time.







FABERGÉ EGGS

The most valuable Easter Eggs are the Fabergé eggs, first commissioned by the Russian Emperor, Czar Alexander III as an Easter surprise for his wife, Maria, and were decorated with jewels. Some eggs are hollow and empty while others are hollow but contain smaller eggs, sweets or other surprises like miniature birds.



A favourite pastime at Easter is the holding of an Egg Hunt. This is when decorated eggs, either real, hard-boiled or artificial and filled with chocolate candies are hidden for children to find, and can take place outdoors or indoors depending on the weather. At the end there may be prizes for the child with the largest collection, or the largest or smallest egg.

FINALLY FOR FUN

The Augustinian Parish Newsletter publishes a pair of cartoons every week. One of this week's (March 22nd) is "eggstraordinarily eggsceptional" and here it is.

Sadly, it is too often, too common in society today.