Easter Day Russian Style    

It fulfills some deep need to connect the present with the past.

It seems the older you are, the more important this is. 

Russian Easter days are filled by visits to family graves remembering people from your own past, visits to and from friends and relations. Old links are re-kindled. Friendships re-affirmed.

In the West don’t have this mixture of folklore, religion and family. 

Easter Parade.

The nearest the West come to a public occasion is an Easter Parade. Maybe encouraged as an excuse to buy new clothes, many public occasions such as horse races, sporting events, car competitions, and similar special  events, include  ‘Easter Bonnet’ displays.

The women wear their new clothes to church,  then walk around all day in the happy mood stimulated by wearing new clothes.

Surely they are entitled to some reward for all that preparation work?

What Food?

The most important item seems to be the humble egg. This old established pagan symbol of fertility was modified by early religious leaders to make Christianity more acceptable to the heathens they wished to convert.

Eggs reminded Christians of The Resurrection as a symbol of re-birth and life renewal.

As a celebration, eggs are cooked, painted and decorated. Often the shells are given a background of stained yellow, by soaking them in onion skins, then covering with bright olours in traditional patterns.

Red is the chosen colour for Russian Eastern eggs, since it represents and reminds us of the spilled blood of Jesus.

Pagan thinking was bright colours represented the arrival of Spring. Such colours represented the ‘throwing off’ the winter gloom.

One tradition still lingering in the West is for children to roll eggs down a hill. The one who can roll their egg the furthest without breaking it wins.

A contemporary Russian game is to have a competition to see who has the strongest egg. A child chooses their egg, holds it for one of the family to hit it with another egg, and so on./strong>

Culture