Pysanky

Our family traditions regarding Easter when I was growing up were simple - lamb for lunch and a large chocolate Easter egg each. One year for breakfast on Easter Sunday, my mother gave us eggs that looked like real eggs, but in fact they were made of some kind of hard candy with chocolate yolks. She gave them to us in egg cups as though they were soft-boiled. We spotted immediately that there was something 'not right' about them as they were cold. She tried to blame that on us having taken too long to get downstairs for breakfast. I think she finally had to tell us that they were a joke when we started banging them on the table - they were VERY hard! Those were the longest lasting Easter eggs we ever got - it took us weeks to lick our way through to the chocolate yolks! (We did get regular chocolate eggs that year too - I'm sure those disappeared very quickly!)

DH's family likes to decorate real hens' eggs, which usually means simply dipping them in some kind of dye to color them. This year, DS and I had the chance to take a class in creating pysanky - Ukranian Easter eggs. I wasn't sure if DS would have the dexterity to do a good job, but I needn't have worried. The teacher knew what she was doing when she said "first grade and up" and he was quite capable of handling the class, open flames and all! He realized immediately that the traditional pysanky were beyond his skills and simply created his own style. After some complaints as we got started, he really enjoyed himself. He not only asked if we can take the class again next year, but wanted to go out right away and buy the tools so that we can teach his sister next weekend.

We'd been warned to wear old clothes as the dye we used is a permanent one. I hadn't realized that the eggs we would be using would be regular, raw, eggs. I'd assumed they would have to be hard-boiled or blown, but apparently it is actually easier to work with raw eggs. In the end, although we both ended up with multi-colored hands, I was the one who dropped a couple of eggs, not DS, and neither of us ruined our clothes.




I think we've just found ourselves a new tradition :-)