Today is Good Friday. In the spirit of secularism, Good Friday is not observed nationwide here. That said, Washington State does not recognize the day as a holiday so school is in and hot cross buns are pretty scarce in the grocery stores in these parts...ie. one or two trays versus rows and rows of them in Canadian grocery stores. Case in point, I brought in hot cross buns for our Palm Sunday celebration in Sunday school last weekend and not one kid had ever had one. Not one kid...how shocking is that? We're heading up to Vancouver today though so I know I'll be able to find my trusty buns. I love to eat hot cross buns, hot cross buns what I love to eat, I bite they little crosses off, I nibble on they raisin feet. Our calendar makes no mention of it either, so my daughter took the liberty of drawing a big wide cross on the day with a stick man Jesus. She has also drawn a squatting bunny with large ears on Sunday.
And she's very excited....for good reason. Easter is arguably the most magical and mysterious of all weekends. Motifs of human death and divine resurrection loom large for the religious amongst us, even as promises of fun, feast and frolic seduce us into celebrating this spring rite of passage with Easter finery, fancy baskets, painted eggs, outdoor egg hunts and ham dinners. Blooming daffodils and glorious sun are an added bonus for us west coasters.Speaking of painted eggs, I decorated my first Ukrainian eggs a couple of weeks back. Holy darn hard, batman. I finally "got" the process twenty minutes before the class ended. I even blurted, "Oh!! I get it!" just as others were beginning to pack up. They just looked at me with that pity smile and nod you see people give sometimes.
But it is a process. The process meaning the hot wax and dye technique. There's a kind of science to this business of egg decorating. You can first dye your egg or you can make wax marks directly on the white part of the egg if you would like white to be your first colour. And then each subsequent dye determines what colour your wax designs will be. So the entire process goes in reverse. Your dominant background colour is your last dye. This should have been more obvious to me - I'm a left-handed, right-brain thinker but I was very fixated about breaking my egg so I wasn't soaking up much in the way of knowledge that day. So suffice to say, it was tricky stuff for us egghead, chicken-scratch, designer types.
Anyways, here, in all their glory, are my first three yeichies. Aren't they to dye for? :) If I could master the art of drawing lines and making geometric designs, I think I might like to try it again, now that I sort of semi-understand the intricacies of the dye and wax process.
On that note, I need to get busy packing. Hoppy easter, one and all!
