Living in the UK: Of Eggs and Easter
An iconic feature of Easter celebrations, these colourful eggs have enlivened the season for centuries. But do you know how these delightful Easter eggs originated?
In Christian tradition, Easter eggs - especially empty ones - symbolise the empty tomb of Jesus and His resurrection. The practice of dyeing chicken or duck eggs in the Easter season could be traced to the early Christians in Mesopotamia. At that time, eggs were dyed red to represent the blood Jesus shed on the cross.
This practice became popular in the Eastern Orthodox churches and was spread to Europe, where the traditional custom of associating eggs with new life and rebirth merged with the Orthodox practice to form this well-known Easter custom. The decorating of the eggs also became more elaborated. In Lancashire and the North of England one makes pace eggs (from the French term “Pâcques”, meaning "Easter") by wrapping them in onion skin and boiling them to give the eggs mottled gold shells. Leaves, flowers and wax can also be used to make patterns on the pace eggs.
Nowadays, with the help of food colouring and paints, decorating eggs becomes a much more easy task. Easter eggs can also come in different shapes and sizes - and even tastes, as different kinds of “eggs” like chocolate eggs and plastic eggs (which one can fill with candy) become popular substitutions to chicken and duck eggs.
Paint your Easter eggs!
Wanting to join in this long Easter egg tradition? Paint some eggs this Easter weekend! After hard-boiling the eggs, you can dye them with natural colouring, food colouring and paint them with food colouring markers / edible pens. But if you want to paint on them with ordinary paints like acrylic paint or markers, please do not eat the eggs afterwards, as these paints are often toxic. To avoid wasting perfectly good eggs, you can empty the eggs before painting over them, and save the contents for later. (BBC Good Food has a detailed how-to-guide on how to empty and paint Easter eggs.)
…And host some egg-citing activities!
Now that you have some beautiful eggs, why not organise an Easter egg hunt with all the children in the neighbourhood, young and old? So, how to host an egg hunt?
Find a gated and safe area, be it your front yard, an enclosed area in the community park, or your house. Make sure that this area is big enough for your eager hunters, but not impossibly so, especially if you have younger children taking part.
Remind the attendees (or their parents) to come with baskets or tote bags for the collected eggs.
Prepare the eggs. You can use decorated hard-boiled eggs or chocolate eggs, but it is safer to hide plastic eggs since they would not melt or go bad in warm temperatures. You can fill the plastic eggs with candies and tiny treats. (Do check that they will not pose a choking hazard for the younger egg hunters though!) You will need about 10-12 eggs per child, so every kid will be able to collect some eggs.
Since an egg hunt ends when the last egg is found, count the eggs before hiding them so that you can tell when the hunt ends.
Make the hunt fun and challenging according to the participants’ ages and abilities. For toddlers, leave the eggs in obvious places where they can spot and reach easily. For older hunters, you can really hide the eggs, like under the leaves, in the bushes, or hide them in the higher tree branches.
Count how many eggs each child has collected, then award every kid with a small gift or treat, like chocolate eggs. An egg hunt can have many winners: for collecting the most eggs, for collecting the special gold / striped / dotted egg(s), or you can come up with more creative prizes for the kids!
If you would like to host some egg-related games with much less preparation, try an Easter egg roll instead! The only preparation you will need is: 1, hard-boiled and decorated eggs; and 2, a gentle hill or slope. Traditionally held on Easter Monday, as the act of rolling the egg is believed to symbolise the angel rolling away the stone at the entrance of Jesus’ tomb, in an egg rolling competition one can win by rolling their hard-boiled, decorated egg the farthest, the longest, or by successfully accomplishing some specific egg-rolling related task (like rolling their egg between two pegs).
Wondering how to make your egg roll far? Learn about the tips in this video where hundreds gathered for the National Trust's annual egg rolling competition at Devil's Dyke, Sussex, in 2017. You can also find out about the National Trust’s Easter trails across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the Easter egg hunts and other Easter-related activities you can do on these trails here.
Have an egg-citing and joyous Easter, everyone!
