Egg Day

I don't like to connect Easter, or Resurrection Day with eggs and bunnies. Yet I do like the tradition of coloring eggs and having Easter traditions. Somehow we need to separate these two celebrations. One can be a celebration of spring, and the other the celebration of the resurrection of our Lord.

Latvia has a long weekend of free days for Easter, Friday and Monday are free. It has been nice to have Janis home more. Friday we visited his aunt, for her birthday.

We also went on a search for white eggs. We went to at least 5 stores and the market and NOBODY had white eggs. Supposedly these stores had had white eggs earlier. But it appreared to me there had been no sign of white eggs in our local grocers. Everyone was looking for white eggs too. Normally in Latvia you don't seen people open their eggs to check them, but the days before Easter everyone wanted white eggs.

In Latvia a lot of people still color eggs according to the old tradtions, usually natural things to color their eggs. I had long wanted to have Janis show me how to color eggs with onion peels, but each year something had kept us from doing this. We have either lacked enough onion peels, or as it appeared would happen this year we lacked the white eggs. Janis' aunt had given us some of her farm eggs earlier in the week and we chose the lightest of them (some being almost white) and decided to color them.

For those who do not know how coloring eggs with onion peels takes place, this is how it is done.

• First you boil the onion peels in enough water so that it will cover the eggs when you put them in the pot. You need quite a lot of onion peels.  You should begin collecting them several months in advance. Once you have boiled them quite a long time, and the water has turned a dark brown then you can remove it from the heat. We did this step the night before. 
• Second you must carefully decorate the eggs and prepare them for the coloring process. I had seen eggs with a fern shape on them and wanted to try that. I took a small fern, placed it on the egg and wrapped it very well with yarn to keep the fern in place. Yarn also makes nice designs when wrapped around and around the egg. (I found out from the neighbors the next day that you can keep your designs in place by putting the eggs in a stocking or nylon knee high). You can use flowers, leaves or any natural material to make interesting patterns on the eggs. 
• When the eggs are decorated according to your liking then you put them in the onion water (peels and all) and boil them as you would normal hard boiled eggs. 
• When done romove from water, and let cool. Unwind any yarn, or remove from stockings and discover how your eggs have turned out. 

It was fun to color eggs with Janis. We had never done that bofore. We also hid eggs for Daniel to find, he really enjoyed that. Then at the breakfast table Janis showed Daniel how to have eggs fights (one Latvian tradtion). The goal is to have the strongest egg so that your egg doesn't get broken when striking or being struck by another persons egg. Janis said as kids they would take their winning egg with them to school to compete against the other "strongest" eggs :)

Here is a video of Janis and Daniel, as you can see Daniel really enjoyed this :) I hope this link works, I have never tried inserting a link here before. http://www.facebook.com/#!/video/video.php?v=381350573835