Easter Traditions

Every year Andrew and I get together with our best friends and their daughter to dye Easter eggs. Because our friends are madly creative and love to make up games, we have developed some serious traditions around the process in the past few years. We spend time decorating our individual eggs with whatever supplies are around. This year they bought some silly kit that had glitter in it. The glitter wasn't so bad, but the dye had oil in it. It was bizarro and made the eggs look all splotchy. If you were looking for nice, even tone you weren't going to get it. After receiving a few disappointed looks from one of us (guess who) the person who BOUGHT the weird kit (um, Easter = PAS where I come from) made some kick-butt colors with water, vinegar, and food coloring. We were off. My favorite egg was decorated to look like forsythia (which I was admiring on the drive over to their house) and Andrew spent a good amount of time carefully mixing colors to achieve an egg that was dyed the color of an egg. It's all about creativity with this. It's not unusual for people to stress out for a few days before the event if they don't have some specific ideas for what to do.

We also dye a group egg. You do something to the egg and then pass it to the next person. After all of the dying is done, we take turns describing the meaning or reason behind our eggs. This could be in the form of a poem, song, or on one occasion an interpretive dance. It is not unusual for the dyed eggs to take on huge meaning and the descriptions can get quite philosophical. Did I mention that the first step of this procedure is to pour a glass of wine?

We take turns describing why we did what we did to the group egg and then, when we're done, we read David Sedaris' "Jesus Shaves" aloud. Each year, we start cracking up earlier and earlier...this year, we were in tears when the title was read.

Thank goodness for traditions and thank goodness for amazing friends.