“‘Happy’ Good Friday!”
The wishes ping forth from the recesses of WhatsApp on the Friday before Easter. It’s a red letter day on the calendar; it’s a long weekend at the office — obviously someone is celebrating something, so let’s send them wishes. The lone Christian on the employee list is singled out for the wishes. Painstakingly patient, they respond, “Good Friday commemorates the death of Christ. It’s a day of remembrance and mourning. We celebrate Easter, the resurrection of Christ on Sunday.”
“Ok, then. Enjoy! We will wish you again for Easter,” goes the response as colleagues head off to DiPuDa (Digha, Puri or Darjeeling for the uninformed) for the break.
Lines outside traditional bakeries see Hot Cross Buns fly off the shelves during this extended weekend. Some bakeries take advance orders for these delicacies — a fruit bun on any other day assumes adjectives ‘hot’ and ‘cross’ on Good Friday when a little dough placed in a cross over the bun ensures it is permitted fare on the day. It’s a day when one fasts or eats very little for 24 hours. But the promise of Easter is just a couple of days away. And with that the other major Christian festival kicks off.
Church first
Hot Cross buns are a staple of Easter festivities My Kolkata
At Christian churches, Easter services begin a little before midnight on Holy Saturday with what is known as the Easter Vigil. During this service the Paschal Candle is lit after a prayer, carried into the church in procession and dipped into a receptacle to purify and sanctify the water there. A series of readings from the Old Testament to the New Testament are followed by a beautifully chanted Exsultet or Easter Proclamation. While there is a deeply religious significance to this, we shall focus on some of the celebratory traditions that have endured the passage of time and which usually begin as the sun goes up the next morning.
Unlike Christmas or Valentine’s Day there is no pre-Easter or Easter Eve dance of which I am aware. Easter ends the 40-day period of Lenten sacrifice (Lent), so everything happens on Easter Sunday.
Roman Catholic ritual of walking to seven churches on Good Friday is followed across the world, including in Kolkata My Kolkata
Chicken or egg?
When we think of Easter we think of rabbits, eggs and fluffy chickens. No one really knows where the imagery comes from, but everyone enjoys the symbols while some struggle to connect them to some religious or heathen practice related to birth, rebirth and even rites of spring. School teachers get kids to create chicken filled greeting cards. Local quizzes are full of questions on how bunnies became a part of Easter. Kids wonder, “Do rabbits lay eggs?” and if the fluffy yellow chickens are hatched, how come we still have the eggs? Your guess is as good as mine, but these three objects have become synonymous with Easter celebration. Good for the sweet hunters, bad for the diabetics.
Painting Easter eggs, and Easter egg hunts for kids are some of the fun traditions of Easter weekend My Kolkata
Back in the children’s choir days, the church would invite us to an Easter breakfast of buns, bananas and hard-boiled eggs. But not your common or garden variety. These eggs were boiled on Saturday and then the choir kids were pressed into service with felt pens and paint brushes to decorate the eggs. The production was fraught with danger — if they weren’t boiled right a few of them would burst and lose their aesthetic appeal. They couldn’t make it past the egg curry. The finished artwork looked cool — they were cool, having been painted the previous day, and refrigerated. The artists among us having painted them painstakingly would wince to see their artwork bashed on a table edge and peeled into a bin while the egg was popped into a hungry mouth, with a pinch of salt.
At home, there was another ritual with eggs. We had to poke two holes into the ends of the raw egg and then blow the contents out of the eggs, one drip at a time — we ate omelettes by the dozen in that week. The empty shells were washed, dried and filled with molten chocolate. The shells were then decorated on the outside. Ah! What joy it was to break those shells on Easter morning. Everyone knew what was inside, but we still went through the motions of insisting, “My chocolate is better than yours.”
Breaking the mould
Giant Easter eggs packed with goodies are a regular sight across Kolkata’s bakeries during Easter My Kolkata
Today, of course, you can purchase moulds from New Market or Amazon. And the moulds aren’t necessarily egg shaped. You get Bunnies, Chickens, and even a Santa Claus. Ho ho ho! Check it out. All these are easily filled with chocolate, dark or white, and occasionally some inner filling like a date or an almond is inserted to make the experience more exciting.
The confectioneries have the fancier equipment to produce “shells” of Marzipan or Nougat or peanut brittle, fill the interior with untold goodies and then cement the edges together with icing. The whole thing dressed tastefully in a cellophane wrapper and finished off with a ribbon! But there are variations. Apart from large, medium and small, which corresponds to SX, VX and LX, like cars — Super Expensive, Very Expensive, Legally Expensive — the eggs are decorated on the outside with superimposed flowers, leaves and even chickens. Sometimes, what we used to call ‘rat sweets’ — saunf (fennel seeds) dipped in colourful sugar coating — also find their way into the design and later tiny fingers coax them off the egg. If any of my dear readers is lost, please saunter past Flury’s, Kookie Jar, Nahoum’s or Saldanha Bakery to view the models — test drives are not permitted before Easter! But you can shake the product to see if it rattles like it’s empty or full. No one gives you a full tank on purchase, be warned.
Pulling rabbits out of hats
The German town of Ostereistedt is credited as the home of the Easter Bunny Shutterstock
There’s a conspiracy theory that credits the Germans for the Easter Bunny. Apparently he was a hare who broke all the rules. Osterhase, a well-dressed male bunny who laid eggs around the house and the garden and then vanished. Many scholars have tried to give a heathen or pagan spin to this but like the mascot of the battery brand, the Energizer Bunny just keeps going, laying and hiding eggs for the kids to find. Many households with young kids perpetuate the mystery of the hidden eggs, much in the same way as Santa pops presents under the tree. Some social organisations and clubs have Easter egg hunts for the younger kids much to the delight of the dentists watching them devour their revenue spinners!
Of sonnets and bonnets
An Easter Parade in New York City Shutterstock
“Oh, I could write a sonnet, about your Easter bonnet” go the lines of a 1940s song from the musical Easter Parade. This tradition, started in America, expected women to overdress with really classy hats and bonnets and promenade around on Easter Sunday. Today, rising temperatures matched by rising hemlines and coloured locks replacing colourful hats, the song has lost its meaning. However, dressing up at Easter is still very much in vogue for bunnies and chicks too. The evening dance on Easter Sunday is a mini fashion show, no pun intended. Rock n roll bands, having recovered from the end of year overkill, are still in touch with their art at Someplace Else and some places else like AM-PM, Skinny Mo’s, Broadway and Hard Rock Cafe to name a few. So, when Easter comes around they are ready to rock! And roll, like chocolate eggs!
