Sunday 31 March 2013

Our Easter

As its Easter, I thought I’d write about our family Easter traditions, many of which I’ve enforced on my own family from when I was a child.

There are the easy ones like….eat as much chocolate as you possibly can without being sick…and if you are sick, you need to start again! OK, not quite but it is essential that you must consume your body weight in chocolate and, because we don’t want mountains of chocolate around the house tempting us to eat it for days, weeks following Easter, we do try to finish it as quickly as possible.

It is about this time of year my chocolate addiction which I tried so hard to fight following Christmas, makes a hasty return!

OK, so Good Friday starts with Hot Cross Buns. We don’t limit them to Good Friday, however, the Hot Cross Bunathon starts a week or two before Easter & continues until we are all sick of them….Easter Monday!

Then it has to be fish & chips for dinner! Growing up, Fridays were always take-away night, usually fish & chips, but I discovered during my years working in a fish & chip take-away and restaurant, that it is actually traditional to eat fish on Good Friday and, in particular, Haddock! Not sure if the haddock was just a local trend or was in fact a traditional fish to eat but that’s what they liked at Oldhams, Rayleigh! Good Friday was our busiest day of the year (second to Boxing Day I think!).

This year, we decided to have it for lunch but when we saw the queue for the chippy restaurant we headed to a local gastro pub but still got our fish and chips.

Saturday turns into a bit of a nothing day, being as it isn’t a ‘special’ day over Easter. I’ve just googled and apparently it is called Holy Saturday or The Great Sabbath. It commemorates the day Jesus was laid in his tomb apparently. Still, its not a day that I, not being religious, celebrate or have any traditions for.

So on to Easter Day, the Sunday.

When I was a child, my siblings and I would run downstairs to see what eggs the Easter Bunny had bought us. They would be on top of the cabinet in the dining room.

This year, for Callum, we have bought him one egg and the Easter Bunny has bought him one. He also has one from each set of grandparents. Millie misses out on the chocolate this year as I’m not in a hurry for her to try chocolate until she is about a year old. My mum has bought her some chocolate but I’m sure all of us will happily help her eat it. Instead of chocolate we have bought her an Easter present. For Callum’s first Easter, he got Easter themed knife, fork & spoon set. It appears inflation has caused the Easter presents to grow somewhat as we have bought Millie a walker which isn’t Easter themed in the slightest. More that we were buying it for her anyway and I wasn’t allowed to buy her an Easter present having just bought her the walker, so I said we had to wait for Easter Sunday to give it to her. Stuart and I have also bought each other an egg….well, I bought him one and also myself one!!!

Breakfast on Easter morning is Eggy Bang Bang with faces. Eggy Bang Bang is soft boiled egg with bread soldiers. On Easter Sunday we draw silly faces on with permanent marker before boiling them.

Then its the all important egg hunt. My mum used to hide Cadbury mini eggs in our dining room for us all to hunt for. They’d predominantly be in the same places each year but a few of them would be missed and we’d end up finding them a couple of months later! When I moved out of home, I made those I lived with play…well hide the eggs for me.

When I got together with Stuart we started hiding the eggs for each other and now we hide them for Callum and then hide them for each other (although this year Stuart and I forwent our egg hunt as we had guests). We still have mini eggs but also include other eggs like cadbury’s creme eggs etc and we group a few eggs together into the plastic eggs and hide those.

As the sun finally decided to show up on Easter day this year, we did the hunt outside in the garden.

Then, on Easter Monday its get as fat as you possibly can day. No traditions other than that! Except that will be a bit harder this year as Stuart and I will be on a Fast Day (max 500 calories for me!)

Happy Easter everyone!

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1 comment:

  1. Lovely to read your traditions. I also do hot cross bunsfor brbreakfast good friday. Issy loves hot cross buns, Olly is not so keen. Samuel loves them. I also follow the fish tradition. .I actually cooked tuna steak on Good Friday which was very yummy. My parents invited us for Sunday dinner and mum does the traditional Easter turkey. Was lovely. Thats as far as our traditions go... oh and chocolate eggs for the kids of course. I think you're right to hold Millie off the choc, I sometimes prefer my kids to have Easter gifts than too much choc x

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