A TRADITIONAL EUROPEAN EASTER
How I Spend Easter in a European Family
Who’s excited for Easter? Me! Don’t you think the chocolate just tastes so much better around this time of year. Among seeing the bright coloured wrapped chocolate flooding the shop shelves and the ads on TV, there’s no wonder we are craving chocolate left right and centre. But hey, there’s no better excuse to indulge in delicious chocolate and feast on family dishes then this time of year.
So, what’s our favourite thing about Easter?
For the Iceberg Media team, it’s all about our family. I would like to take you on a journey through my Easter celebrations.
In my family, it’s one of the few occasions during the year where we all try to come together to celebrate and catch up. I have a Macedonian background, so Easter is the perfect excuse for catching up, talking, eating and laughing. We love coming to one person’s house and putting on a feast, each bringing a classic dish.
Let me make your stomach grumble. My grandmother always cooks her exceptional prawn rice and potato dish. I can always expect it on the menu. She cooks a lot of it too. I’m talking the size of a large pizza tray! We have a relatively big family with even bigger appetites. So you imagine left overs is not really a problem for us.
There’s usually a chicken lasagna, lots of Mediterranean salads and of course some Zelnik. For those of you who don’t know what this is, your missing out on something life changing. Zelnik (also known as Pita) is thin layers of filo pastry filled with crumbled feta cheese. My Baba (grandmother) also does one filled with grated pumpkin (my favourite!) but the feta cheese is an all time classic. My Baba generally puts $2 coins throughout the dish (yes we usually know it’s in there before we eat it). If you bite into a size with a coin, it’s good luck. There’s nothing sort of traditional dishes and all time favourites.
Besides from the food (I know I talk about food a lot), a traditional activity that takes place at our Easter celebrations is an egg tapping game (also referred as tsourgrisma). You’ve probably seen or heard about this from your Greek and Macedonian friends whereby we dye eggs red, hard boil them and tap them with others eggs. You tap the bottom with someone else’s bottom and the top with the top of another’s egg. We continue this until everyone has cracked their eggs with each other and are down to the lucky person with the least cracked egg. Whoever’s egg is not cracked at the end will receive good luck. This is really fun. And a bonus- you get to eat the egg if you like afterwards.
And of course, it’s not Easter in my household without a little Easter egg hunt! It doesn’t matter what age you are, we still have a little fun with this childhood favourite. And I personally look forward to it every year.
I hope you all have a lovely and safe Easter this year.
What are you doing on Easter? Let us know in the comments below.
