Easter Eggs

I just got done coloring Easter eggs.

It’s a great tradition I learned from my childhood and after a long absence of practice, the tradition has come unto itself again in the fantasy of my four year old daughter. The only problem is that I live approximately 500 feet above seat level. To my knowledge, there are no bunnies that can leap that far. Not even the attack rabbits from Monty Python.

At least Santa has a quick entrance and escape route. Luckily for the Santa fantasy, I have a chimney in my cloud-level existence. As we live at such a height and because today we locked ourselves out of our building, the only explanation I’ve been able to come up with for the giant-bunny-entering-our-flat so far has been: “he’s magic, like Harry Potter”. So far, it’s working.

Tonight I even blew eggs. The pin-hole-in-each-end-of-the-egg technique that magically leaves the shell intact. We only wrecked three eggs, including a complete yolk in my eye. I hate that. I also think I blew out a few blood vessels in my eyes trying to blow that bloody yolk out of the egg.

My newest theory: I believe egg-blowing is the closest approximation a man can come to giving birth. Trying to get the contents out of the egg through that little hole, I looked like a red-eyed Dizzy Gillespie.

But tonight the Easter Bunny will scale the walls of my 500 foot castle, hide the colored eggs sitting on my table, eat the carrot we carefully placed for his effort and read the crayon-drawn note we left for him.

I’m so excited.

Some history and other arcane facts

The tradition of exchanging colored eggs in the springtime predates Easter by several centuries.

• The ancient Egyptians buried eggs, a symbol of resurrection and birth, in their tombs.
• The ancient Greeks placed eggs atop graves. When the Greeks took over ancient Israel, many Jews adopted Hellenistic practices. To this day, Jews place rocks atop gravestones to signal that the grave has been visited and the loved one remembered (perhaps as a substitute for eggs).
• Legend holds that Simon of Cyrene, the egg merchant who helped carry Christ's crucifix to Calvary, returned to his farm to discover that all of his hens' eggs had turned to a rainbow of colors.
• For Jews a roasted egg on the Passover Seder plate stands for life and the hope of salvation for many, many centuries. Christians have adopted the egg to represent Christ’s Resurrection.
• In China, parents might give family members and friends a red-dyed egg to announce the birth of a child.
• Germans use green eggs as a symbol of mourning on Maundy Thursday, the Thursday before Easter.
• During the Renaissance in Italy, romantic young men tossed empty eggshells filled with perfume or cologne at young women (Undoubtedly whilst looking like Dizzy Gillespie). The custom spread to Austria, France and Spain. Later, in Mexico, empty eggshells were filled with confetti and used to make wishes. The eggshells, called cascarones, are still used today at Easter and for other happy occasions.
• For a special celebration, Japanese parents give their children eggs that are decorated to look just like the children!
• When the Tsars ruled Russia, the jeweler named Peter Carl Faberge made eggs out of precious metals and gems. The tsars gave the eggs to family members as special gifts.
• Using wax, many colors of dye and special designs, Slavs make very fancy decorated eggs called pysanky. Long ago, people believed that the pysanky helped keep the world going around. The beautiful pysanky are still made in modern times and some collectors display them all year.
• Raw eggs harden when boiled in water because the water's intense heat causes the egg's protein strands to unravel, exposing their ends, which then bond together with other unraveled protein strands.
• Since the protein structure of egg white and egg yolk vary slightly, the egg white hardens at 176 degrees Fahrenheit, while the egg yolk hardens at 185 degrees Fahrenheit.
• During the week of Easter, egg sales in the US reach approximately 100 million dozen. The week after Easter, sales drop to 70.0 million.