Easter And Traditions

First of all, Happy Easter and Happy Palm Sunday as both are celebrated today. I'm celebrating Easter and I'd like to show you some traditional food we usually have and share some stories about Easter tradition in Transylvania and how time changed those traditions.

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Easter In 2020

Easter usually is spent with family and friends, this year however that wasn't possible in most of the countries. The lockdown must be taken seriously as health always comes first. I see no reason to be sad or dramatic. I'm healthy, my family is healthy, so there will be other occasions to be together and celebrate, after we get rid of the pandemic.

Traditional Easter Dishes

This year I made the traditional dishes as usual, which are lamb soup, and lamb with potato salad for main course.

The soup is made of different part of the lamb with carrot, parsley, onion, garlic, salt, pepper, tarragon, tarragon vinegar, sour cream and egg.

The main course is very simple, lamb with spices and a simple sour potato salad.

As a dessert, sweetbread is what I used to bake but this year sweetbread is going to be late for the party, tomorrow is the day for it, so I'll be back with the recipe.

Eggs

There's no Easter without Easter eggs, even though this year there will be no visitors to give eggs to. Easter eggs have a tradition which I'm going to tel you about a little bit later in this post. Now I'd like to show you what kind of eggs we have this year.

Decorating Easter eggs is a fun activity. Kids love it, especially when there's plenty of dye to play with. You can buy it at every grocery store, there's no shortage of that, not even this year. However I've chosen to use as natural ingredients as possible, which is onion peels.

This is a very old method used by our ancestors when there were no artificial dyes and worked fine. Today I'm going to show you how's done.

You need one ingredient, onion peels, that's all.

Throw the onion peels in a pot, add the eggs, add water and cook for about 20 - 30 minutes. When it's done, use a drop or two or oil to make them shiny.

It's the healthiest option so far, organic, clean and healthy. Not to mention cheap as these peels are thrown away anyway, so why not use it.

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Back In The Day

That kind of egg decorating has been always something I wanted to try out as it's absolutely gorgeous. It's done with beeswax by hand and needs a lot of practice or talent, or both. If you look at the details, you can see how hard t must be to do it right. It's art in my opinion and it's not for everyone.

Last year me and my niece (who also has an artistic side) decided to give it a try. It was a total failure as nothing acceptable came out of it, but it was a good experience. I did a post about it, if you have the patience to scroll through one year of posting, be my guest.

This is one of the photos I posted in that blog last year. That's me, trying to create something using beeswax. I'm using a homemade tool that is made of a soda can, a piece of wood and string.

This is another decorating method we tried last year without much success I must admit. You need a leaf that has a nice shape and silk stockings.

This is what we got at the end. The leaves are visible (kind of) but the lace-like decoration is better left unmentioned 😂 We were not disappointed at all as we kind of knew what we're getting into. It was a god experience and we had a lot of fun.

Old Tradition

There's an old tradition in Transylvania and Hungary as well, that went through a lot of transformation over the years and it's on its way of disappearing. It's called Easter sprinkling.

When I was a little girl, boys and men, family members, neighbors, relatives and acquaintances came to visit us on the second day of Easter, sprinkled us with perfume and we gave them Easter eggs. Imagine having 30 - 40 guests a day, all sprinkling you with perfume.

The tradition says boys and men are sprinkling girls and women so they don't wither. In modern days it's done with perfume but it wasn't like that back in our grandmothers day.

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This is how it's been done for years. Boys dragged out girls to the well and doused a buckle or two of cold water on them. I bet it was a lot of fun for guys, not so much for the girl who was at the receiving end. There were cases when girls dies of pneumonia or meningitis as neither was treatable those days.

Over the years the tradition has changed, guys are using perfume now but at the countryside there are cases when they are still crossing the line. In villages, where there's a tight community, this tradition can live forever but in big cities it's already a history. You call whoever you think it's necessary, wish then Happy Easter, maybe meet some relatives and that's all.

With the lockdown this year celebration is more like symbolic but I'm more than grateful for that. It's enough to know everyone is safe.

So I'm wishing everyone Happy Easter!