Easter Miscellany

Easter is very late this year - April 24th - and only two weeks before Mother's Day which has the florists unhappy as they prefer a bigger gap between these two busiest holidays for their industry.
Many of the secular symbols have been handed down from earlier times  - both the rabbit/hare and the egg are symbols of fertility and connected to the Spring equinox. Many organizations hold Easter egg hunts - in the White House children would be searching for eggs on the south lawn while Ronald Reagan had a jar of jelly beans on his desk. Hard boiled eggs were dyed various colors which prompted a practice of "egg tapping" which Europeans called "epper" or "upper". When we visited our cousins they seemed very adept at the game which involved two parties tapping their eggs against each other and the first one to crack was the loser and gave up their egg to the winner. I always seemed to leave with fewer eggs than I came with. Much later I learned that the tapered end of the egg is the more vulnerable to the rounded end.
 I thought my cousins invented the game as they always had the "upper" hand.
This year the Greek Easter also falls on April 24 which is unusual. Normally, theirs is celebrated at a different time and the Greek kids down the street shared their delicacies with us - their breads, cakes and particularly their roasted chestnuts - the aroma of which I encountered much later from the vendors on the sidewalks of New York.
tjs
Next - Good Friday