I knew that Easter week was packed with holidays, not just Christian, and I had anticipated celebrating them all. This did not happen. All I got around to celebrate was Passover and Easter.

For Passover I made Matzo. Matzo is the bread that their ancestors made before fleeing Egypt after years of persecution. Because they had to leave in a hurry the bread was not left to leaven and consisted of the simple ingredients that are flour and water. The ritualistic preparation of Matzo is carried out throughout Passover. Many Jewish do not consider commercial Matzo legitimate and prefer to make it themselves. From the time the water hits the flour the Matzo has to be ready within 18 minutes.

I got very exited about the sense of play that seemed to be involved in making the bread and I was determined to make it within the time limit. I set the timer on 18 minutes, made the bread, put it in the oven and ate it. It wasn’t until I turned off the light in the kitchen on my way to bed that the timer biped. The bread was anything but tasty though, very dry and paper-like.

For Christian Easter I decided to let go of preparations because we were invited to my sister’s house in London. Together with her girlfriend, who is English/French, they had designed a holiday mixed according to their own traditions.

In the morning of Easter Sunday we painted our faces and wore scarves like pagan witches. We also painted eggs to decorate a bunch of branches with. This tradition is common in Sweden where few trees have leafs by Easter and taking some branches into the house speeds up the process making a nice green addition to the celebrations. Eggs have long been associated with strong symbolic meanings. The Romans used it as a symbol of the universe, the Pagans as a symbol of the rebirth of nature in springtime and the Christians use it to symbolise the rebirth of man in Jesus Christ.

Later in the day an egg hunt was organised in the garden. This is customary in France and England but we had two contending versions. The English version had it that the Easter Bunny laid the eggs, the French version was told by Mmedo’s mother in an email:

‘When I was a little girl in France, my father told us that all the bells flew to Rome on Good Friday (they did not ring until the night of Easter Sunday). When they came back, they dropped decorated or chocolate eggs all over the country. And we searched for them in the garden. In my family, it was only decorated boiled eggs, it neither was chocolate nor sugared eggs.’ Marie Paule Huet

It really inspires me to get all these traditions mixed up with each other. Initially, I thought that these different stories might confuse my own children and rob them from a consistent traditional experience but I now think otherwise. I realize that the things I did as a child during holidays were already a great mix between myth, history, religion and paganism and that I didn’t know why I was doing what I was doing most of the time. Children just do and if the spirits are high and the stories are plenty they’re happy. It is later in life that we question the grounding of our actions.

In the evening we had a barbeque of lamb. Eating lamb on Easter comes from Jewish Passover. The Jewish would sacrifice a lamb in the hope that God would protect them. Christians use the lamb as a metaphor for Jesus’ relation to his father as Jesus is ‘the lamb of God’. These two accounts have merged by time and Christians, just like Jewish people, now often eat lamb on Easter.