Now if you're new to this blog, you're probably wondering "Hey, if she's an atheist, what's she doing celebrating the festival of the goddess Astarte??"
But, as I explained in this earlier blog entry Tradition!, I like to participate in the traditions of my culture, even if some people associate those traditions with various deities I don't believe in.
We practice an interesting mix of French and American customs in our house. For example, it seems that here in France, people don't really dye boiled eggs like they do in the US. I figured out pretty quickly that this is probably because the eggs sold here are always brown, and the brown ones don't take the dye as well.
But I'm not one to let something as trivial as that stop me!!! I discovered that the trick is that instead of making one cup of dye per color and dipping multiple eggs in each one, you make an individual dye cup for each egg, and let it sit in the dye for a long time:
We're learning through experimentation every year around here. This year I was cleverly thinking "If leaving the eggs in the dye for a half-hour produced bright colors, then leaving them in for an hour-and-a-half will make them even brighter!!!"
Experimentation proved this theory wrong. It would appear that if you wait too long, the vinegar actually starts to degrade the shells, so I got brighter colors last year just leaving them in for fifteen minutes to a half-hour. Still, they weren't a total failure:
Since Noell was talking about telling kids about the Easter Bunny over on her blog, I was curious as to where my Nicolas thought the eggs came from. He said they came from flying bells. (There's no Easter Bunny in France -- the eggs are dropped by flying bells.) I then asked him if Mommy colored the eggs. He said yes and pointed to the ones Mommy colored.
Then when I asked where the candy came from, he said it came from "up!" I asked if it didn't perhaps come from Champion (he was with me when I bought it), but he didn't seem to understand the question.
So that's where we're at with respect to holiday mythology... ;-)
7 comments:
I really enjoyed this. Very cool to see how the cultures are mixed to produce such unique (and hence less dogmatic) experiences for you kids.
Happy Easter... and your son is cute. The egg dyeing looks like a lot of fun too. My husband swears that he should find a bunny suit. ;-)
Is that your son? He's seriously adorable. Experimenting with eggs is always fun, even if they don't turn out well. It's the journey, right?
Yep, that's my Leo!!!
And yep, we had fun... ;-)
Too bad you had to wait until after church.
If you'd been allowed to do it first thing in the morning instead of church, it might have worked better... ;-)
Hey... we had snow on Easter. I am looking at the snow aftermath. Icy and cold
You're really determined! I just get the plastic eggs and put chocolate eggs and malt balls in them. All that egg dyeing is just too much work. ;-)
Besides I likes the chocolate.
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