Now that Easter is right around the corner, have you been wondering how other cultures celebrate it? Well, if you keep reading, I promise you’ll want to try some of these.
One both interesting and weird tradition is in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and some parts of Hungary, where local men and boys roam the streets, going house to house, with gaily decorated willow switches, usually adorned with ribbons, looking for girls to whip. The whipping is not intended to be painful but instead is meant to bring good health and beauty. If men arrive at women’s houses after 12 o’clock, women throw a bucket of cold water on them.
In Bermuda, people make their own kites with wooden sticks, colorful paper, and fun designs. The sticks that provide structural integrity for the creation form a cross or star shape and symbolize the resurrection. The kites are topped off with a special tissue called “hummers”, which then makes a buzzing sound, known as the Bermudian Easter sound. Everyone gathers at the Horseshoe Bay Beach, where there is the annual Kite Festival, on Good Friday, and lets their kites fly. For mealtime, they eat traditional dishes, which include hot cross buns and codfish cakes.
Australians don’t have an Easter bunny but an Easter Bilby, a small, endangered rodent native to the country. To raise money and make people more aware of the dwindling of this species, they even make bilby-shaped chocolate. They also organize many festivals, including the Sydney Royal Easter show standing out, which takes place at Sydney Olympic Park for two weeks. Here, urbanites get a glimpse of agricultural life in rural Australia, enjoying the time spent with their families and friends.
One of my personal favorite ways of celebrating is in Norway, where televisions run crime shows and a lot of detective novels come out around this time. People across the country escape into their mountain cabins and spend the weekend reading police books or watching murder mysteries. Even the milk company contributes to this phenomenon (by printing stories on milk cartons), which was triggered by the immense popularity of a crime novel in 1923, set on the Bergen railway. Also, Norwegians eat more than 20 million oranges on Easter weekend. This tradition has most likely originated when oranges were only available during their late winter season, so they represented a harbinger of spring and great days to come.
In Hungary, women dress up in traditional clothes on that specific Sunday and get splashed with water. This is called “sprinkling”. Boys and men go from door to door, visiting female relatives and friends, with a bucket of water. Women are considered flowers, who might wither without the yearly sprinkling. After they ask if they can sprinkle the woman, in the form of a “sprinkle poem”, they pour the bucket of water on them. In exchange, the boys get painted eggs, candy, or money. It’s considered to be a shame if a girl is not ready when the first sprinklers arrive, or if she doesn’t have enough painted eggs for her visitors.
So, which one of these got your attention? Are you going to read murder mysteries or eat bilby-shaped chocolate this year?
Editor
Melissa Parv
Comments