Tag Archives: easter

A Greek Easter

Nationality: Greek
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Athens, Greece
Performance Date: 4/16/19
Primary Language: Greek
Language: English

Interviewer: Do you know of any traditions that are different in Greece compared to America?

AH: Yes one that is very different is how we celebrate Easter. It is a much bigger thing there, we take a whole week off and do a lot of different stuff. 

Interviewer: What else is different? How do you celebrate?

AH: We start by generally having dinner throughout the week with family and friends to celebrate all week. At these dinners we do a thing with eggs, where we have red boiled eggs, the red represents the blood of Christ, and at dinner, you smash your egg against those next to and see who’s breaks. If yours breaks you lose and you eat it but if you win you keep doing it until it breaks. Another thing is that at the church everyone gathers the night before Easter Sunday at the church and the church does a ceremony representing the resurrection of Christ and everyone goes crazy after. We celebrate that like how Americans do the fourth of July, with fireworks and stuff. 

Interviewer: Are these traditions special to Greece? 

AH: I’m not really sure, I thought everyone did it until I came to America and saw how differently easter is celebrated. But everyone in Greece does it this way. 

Interviewer: How do you feel about the different traditions of celebrating Easter?

AH: I prefer how we do it in Greece, it makes Easter feel more special and more important and it is something that is very fun.

Context: My informant is an eighteen-year-old student at USC. He was born in Athens, Greece and lived there his entire life until coming to Los Angeles for college. He is Catholic and has celebrated Easter every year of his life in Greece. This interview took place in person at Leavey library on USC’s campus. 

Analysis: This is a good example of how as people we view our traditions as very normal until seeing a group that in this instance celebrates the same thing with their own culture’s different traditions and customs. It also shows how Greece is a place that takes celebrating Easter perhaps more seriously than America, even though those who celebrate are celebrating something very important to their religion. I enjoyed hearing my informant explain something that I thought I knew all about, celebrating Easter, in a different fashion.

 

Easter Egg Cracking Ceremony

Nationality: American
Age: 63
Occupation: Teacher
Residence: Austin
Performance Date: 03/12/19
Primary Language: English

Content:
Informant – “I went to an egg cracking contest for Easter. Well, it wasn’t really a contest. More like a tournament. Like, it was a jousting match. People would go up, two at a time, and each person would grab an egg, and then they’d like stab at each others’ eggs with their own eggs, and whoever’s egg cracked first lost. And there was a whole roster. So if you lost you were out, but if you won you progressed to the next round.”

Context:
Informant -“I have no idea what it was about. First time I ever went. It’s organized by OG, and he’s been doing it since the 90’s, and it grows every year, so it has like cultural significance now, but he didn’t explain the underlying meaning.”
The celebration took place in Austin, Texas.

Analysis:
It’s reminiscent of the Freudian release. Eggs are supposed to be somewhat sacred on Easter. They are mentioned and depicted everywhere. And this celebration completely reverses that reverence by destroying dozens of eggs.

Easter Egg Traditions

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/10/18
Primary Language: English
Language: French

Context & Analysis

My roommate (the subject) and I were sitting in our dorm room talking about how our families celebrated different holidays. The subject’s family is relatively large and extremely tight-knit. Most of her extended family live within an hour radius, and they highly value family gatherings. The dying of the Easter eggs the night before is a tradition carried out only by her immediate family, suggesting that this tradition might not be shared with her extended relatives. It is also interesting to consider that the family chooses to celebrate Easter despite not being religious themselves. Additionally, the subject and her sisters are all high school age or older, so I think that it is fascinating that their mother maintains the façade of the Easter bunny hiding the eggs. It appears that the tradition of the performing the event in the exact way it has “always” been is a way to preserve an important part of girls’ childhood.

 

Main Piece

“On Easter, we always do an Easter egg hunt and the night before we always dye hard-boiled eggs. And my parents always hide the eggs and it’s funny because they keep the façade of ‘Oh, the Easter bunny hid it over there, wow he’s so sneaky!” but its them, it’s like—but my sisters and I are (all three) old enough that we know that, but, like, it’s funny that they still keep that. My mom won’t shop for Easter bunny stuff in front of us, she’ll like—my sister pointed out some stuff to her at Target like “Oh mom, look those are cute baskets for everyone “ and she’s like “No that’s Easter bunny shopping, the Easter bunny will come back later” [laughs], so she attempts to like keep that going, but it’s funny and it’s always been that way.”


 

Pomlázka Celebration

Nationality: Czech
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: N/A
Performance Date: 4/13/18
Primary Language: Czech
Language: English

Informant: On every Easter Monday it is a Czech tradition for men to create a Pomlázka, which is an approximately one meter long wooden stick. This stick is then used to whip women on the butt.

The whipping is traditionally accompanied by a song, its purpose is to cleanse the woman of diseases and they are rewarded with sweets if they are children and alcohol if they are old enough to drink. Then, in some parts of the country, it is also a tradition for women to spill or pour a bucket of cold water on men as a reaction.

The songs usually are something along the lines of “give me eggs”, referring to the overarching tradition of Easter eggs. The most commonly song is something like: “Hody, hody, doprovody, dejte vejce malovaný, nedáte-li malovaný, dejte aspoň bílý, slepička vám snese jiný”, which I believe roughly translates to: “Hey, hey, give us coloured Easter eggs, if you don’t have coloured ones, give us at least white ones, your hen will give you new ones”

Context: My informant is a nineteen year old Czech national attending school in the United States. He’s lived in Prague for most of his life, and Czech is his first language. The interview was conducted face-to-face in a college dorm room.

Background: My informant actively participates in Easter celebrations in Prague, where this tradition is widely practiced. According to him, most people find it ridiculous, but nevertheless entertaining, a view which he shares. He believes that this is an important expression of Czech culture, as this tradition dates back generations, but also thinks that it is practiced mostly for entertainment.

Analysis: This was one of the first holiday based customs I encountered while collecting elements of folklore. I was surprised that, despite occurring on Easter, the custom is actually relatively devoid of Christian symbolism, instead focusing on the egg element of the holiday. This seems to reflect a less-dominant role of religion within Czech culture, as Easter Sunday, a not unimportant day for Christians, is celebrated without the mention of Jesus or the resurrection at all. There are, however, some religious undertones, as the whipping sticks used by the men supposedly “cleanse” the women of their diseases.

Aerosols, C4, and High-Powered Rifles

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Sacramento, CA
Performance Date: April 23, 2018
Primary Language: English

Main Piece:

The following is transcribed from a conversation between the performer (EC) and I (ZM).

ZM: Do you do anything, like special, around Christmas? Other than like the goulash?

EC: Not really. We have a lot of like very family specific traditions, um, because my grandparents owned like a huge ranch in Napa and had like a winery and everything. And so like, that has been like in the family for generations and so like a lot of our holiday tradition’s centered around like going up to the house and like being rednecks in general.

ZM: What do you do?

EC: Um like, on Easter, we would like blow things up. So like, for Easter I might get some aerosol paint cans and then some like C4 explosive and put them together and then shoot it with a high powered rifle just to see how big of a fireball I can make.

ZM: (laughs) And that’s just… because they live on a ranch?

EC: That’s just our family. Yeah.

ZM: Do you go every year and like blow stuff up? Is that like a…

EC: Yeah. It actually burned down, so like not in the last year with this recent fires, but yeah um before that we would go for like every holiday, like Fourth of July, Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving, other random stuff.

ZM: And do you blow stuff up every holiday?

EC: Basically. Every holiday involves shooting guns in our family.

 

Context: This is from a conversation I started with EC originally about her German traditions.

 

Background: EC is a sophomore studying at the University of Southern California. She is of German descent.

 

Analysis: I thought it was ironic that EC and her family always try to create the biggest fireballs that they can on the ranch and it ended up burning down, but the two events were completely unrelated. The actual act seemed unrelated to the variety of holidays it is performed on. The explosions seem more like something they do when they’re together and they just happen to be together on those holidays.