Easter Traditions?

[CarleeAnn]

Awesome...My Mom was cheap so we used our own crayons and her food colouring.....Still was fun and it was fun eating those eggs too..Tasted better when all pretty..
Decorated eggs with my Boys only twice..They were not fond of it though?...

This year we used vinegar and food coloring- works just the same! When we have kids I don’t think we will get those kits either. I only dyed a few hollowed eggs so we can keep them for decorations! I want to try and make a little nest to glue them in for a centerpiece.

 

[CarleeAnn]

The dye is non toxic and safe to eat. Leaving them out for hunting doesn't hurt them. We hunted boiled, dyed eggs and would leave them in our baskets, unrefrigerated for a few days while we ate them. No one got sick. Now with my kids we dye them the night before. I put them in the fridge until the next day. Hide them and they find them. We usually eat a few and have egg salad for lunch. They don't last longer than a day at my house.

When I was young we would to the same thing but just eat them when we found them. My little brothers still dye eggs each easter but afterwards we just put them in the fridge and eat them throughout the week.

Dyed and hid them on 'Easter Eve' to be hunted for the next day. Been eating them for 75 years and no so far. Hope that I have not just jinxed myself.

Seems as though my husbands family was the only one who threw them out!

Glad I’m in the norm.

 

[chickens really]

This year we used vinegar and food coloring- works just the same! When we have kids I don’t think we will get those kits either. I only dyed a few hollowed eggs so we can keep them for decorations! I want to try and make a little nest to glue them in for a centerpiece.

Cute..Was always fun I thought..

 

[rebrascora]

We always died our eggs with wild flowers, ferns and onion skins. We went out and collected the wild flowers and leaves with an interesting structure and pressed them against the eggs, then carefully wrapped in brown onion skins and then old rags and boiled them.
I'm not sure if it is just a local tradition here in the North East of the UK but on Easter Sunday we rolled them down a steep hill and those that didn't break were then used for a jarping competition, similar to conkers, in that you would use your egg to try to break your opponents egg shell. I can't ever remember having an Easter Egg hunt. There were just competitions for the prettiest dyed egg.... using anything man made was considered cheating.... the hill rolling contest and the jarping contest. Most of the eggs got eaten but the prettiest one usually got pride of place on the mantelpiece and would sit there for months and eventually the contents would shrink and the egg would roll around inside the shell like a marble. It never smelled bad or anything.

I never worry about refrigerating eggs. I'm not sure why they would be any more likely to go bad once they have been boiled than they would before and I've eaten boiled eggs that have sat on the kitchen bench for over a week and still been fine. There is much less of a culture of refrigerating eggs here in the UK.... eggs are not refrigerated in the shops.... not sure if this is due to our climate being less hot than many parts of the USA or our fridges being smaller!

 

[CarleeAnn]

We always died our eggs with wild flowers, ferns and onion skins. We went out and collected the wild flowers and leaves with an interesting structure and pressed them against the eggs, then carefully wrapped in brown onion skins and then old rags and boiled them.
I'm not sure if it is just a local tradition here in the North East of the UK but on Easter Sunday we rolled them down a steep hill and those that didn't break were then used for a jarping competition, similar to conkers, in that you would use your egg to try to break your opponents egg shell. I can't ever remember having an Easter Egg hunt. There were just competitions for the prettiest dyed egg.... using anything man made was considered cheating.... the hill rolling contest and the jarping contest. Most of the eggs got eaten but the prettiest one usually got pride of place on the mantelpiece and would sit there for months and eventually the contents would shrink and the egg would roll around inside the shell like a marble. It never smelled bad or anything.

I never worry about refrigerating eggs. I'm not sure why they would be any more likely to go bad once they have been boiled than they would before and I've eaten boiled eggs that have sat on the kitchen bench for over a week and still been fine. There is much less of a culture of refrigerating eggs here in the UK.... eggs are not refrigerated in the shops.... not sure if this is due to our climate being less hot than many parts of the USA or our fridges being smaller!

That sounds awesome! I would love to have done that. I want to try your way of boiled them with flowers and onion skin- that sounds so neat.

 

[rebrascora]

Dandelions and primroses and violets work well and ferns but it is fiddly keeping them all in position whilst you wrap them in the onion skins and then the old rags and tie with string. The onion skins provide a nice brown colouration around the flower colours. Oh and we rubbed them with butter after they were boiled to seal the colours and give them a nice sheen. The best bit was foraging for the wild plants, especially if Easter was early and there were very few flowers open.... that was probably more of an Easter hunt than any of the rest of it!

 

[rebrascora]

They are called Pace Eggs.... not sure why. The last 3 Sundays of Lent were called Carlin, Palm and Pace Egg days. Carlins were small brown peas that were boiled and eaten with a little vinegar I believe, obviously Palm Sunday, was celebrated with Palm crosses and then Pace Eggs on Easter Sunday. I just looked it up and this was a very local custom dating back to 1644..... http://www.heritageandhistory.com/c...ing_wp_cron=1522589614.9042310714721679687500

I would be interested to know if anywhere else in the world has any similar traditions as regards the hill rolling and jarping eggs?? I'm not even sure if this happened in other areas of the UK..... obviously you couldn't hill roll them if you lived in a flat area so that might be local. I know there is cheese hill rolling competitions in other parts of the country, where you chase down a very steep hill after a cheese.

 

[rebrascora]

Yay! I found You Tube footage of egg rolling in Iowa....

 

[rebrascora]

And..... Egg Jarping does exist in other parts of the world at Easter...
http://www.greece-is.com/article/win-greek-egg-tapping/

 

[rebrascora]

And examples of eggs died with flowers and onion skins....
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=d...AhUMI8AKHc2BCegQ9QEISjAE#imgrc=qOIdrLe0dDh3wM: