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24 maaliskuuta 2013

Pääsiäismarkkinaherkkuja. Easter fair delicasies.

Olin tänään mansikkaystävän kanssa myymässä herkkuja Metsänkylän pääsiäismarkkinoilla.

Today I helped a strawberry friend to sell delicasies at the Metsänkylä Easter fair.











02 toukokuuta 2012

Unseasonally Easter

Easter is almost a month in the past and for reasons unclear to me, my spouse is still obsessed with Easter eggs. Or, actually, with the story told to children about who lays the eggs—the famous Easter bunny versus Easter rooster controversy. (Apparently some people have not heard of the rooster, ever, and obviously this won't do.)

My spouse does indeed live with a walking encyclopedia with a sense of humor of an Asperger when it comes to facts. I suspect it's sometimes tiresome. Then at times it's useful. So just imagine his shock when he found out that the encyclopedia contains no information about Easter bunnies and rabbits at all. (And very little interest towards the subject, plus some faint memory that there was something about either animal in The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. Probably the rooster. Or, wait, maybe the rabbit?)

It's a good thing I have a lot of free time.

I started my quest suspecting that the bunny‒rooster controversy may have something to do with the east‒west division. Finland is located between eastern and western traditions, which bunch of our own customs added to it, and that's why we are popular among religious and folk scientists. That is also why traditions, as well as dialects, are often divided into eastern and western. My family is from Carelia—that is, east—and I remember being told since child that it is the rooster who lays the eggs. If my theory was correct, it would leave bunnies for the west.

First it seemed that this may actually be the case. The bunny tradition has a middle European origin: an Easter Hare was first mentioned in 1682 referring to an Alsace tradition. Rabbits and hares—like eggs—used to be symbols of fertility, for reasons quite obvious (although I certainly didn't know before that female rabbits can concieve again when still pregnant with the previous litter). It was also thought that hares are hermaphrodites and can thus reproduce without losing their virginity, which led to an association with Virgin Mary. The European hare later changed into a bunny in America.

It seems, however, that Easter rooster is a Scandinavian tradition. Here it claims that it is the rooster (påsktuppen) who lays the eggs, except that eggs laid by him are of cardboard and filled with candy. There are also blogs with Swedes horrified with the idea of a bunny. In Swedish Christian tradition the rooster is considered a symbol of vigilance, and in these beautiful illustrations the rooster claims that the hen has betrayed him, making him thus Jesus and the hen Judas. And while wikipedia keeps quiet about the rooster, googling in Finnish gives a lot of hits.

That about my theory. It seems that egg-laying bunnies dwell in America; hares in Europe; roosters in Scandinavia. But what about Russia, where many eastern Finnish traditions come from? My Russian informant tells me that a Russian saying goes,

"Every child knows that a hen lays eggs."

But why the abundance of eggs? And why chicks? The answer is simple. Because eggs were considered dairy, it was forbidden to eat them during the lent. If they were not let to hatch, they had to be hard-boiled in order to store them until the Easter feast, and then they had to be eaten quite quickly. Naturally it was also a good time to let eggs hatch—that's why the chicks.

Obviously a lot of symbolism is involved. The hard shell symbolizes the tomb of Christ and cracking the shell his resurrection from death. Painting eggs red symbolizes the blood Christ shed when crusified. In traditions even older, Zoroastriand painted eggs for their spring celebration, and in Fenno-Ugric mythology the world is created of a fallen egg.

Apparently people have also been toying with eggs, tapping, dumping, jarping, dancing and rolling them down the hills. Incidentally, the highest peak of otherwise very flat Estonia is called Suur Munamägi (Great Egg Hill, 318 m), and when residing in Southern Estonia I was told it was named so because people used to go there on Easter to roll down eggs.

And still one final piece of information: Easter is named after an old Germanic goddess Ēostre. The month named after her was equivalent to our April and a feast was held on her honor to celebrate spring.