FAIQ #3 What did the Easter Bunny bring you when you were a kid in Ireland??
A: There was no Easter Bunny
Lent was a time of fasting. No cakes. No nice things made with eggs. To use up all your eggs so they wouldn’t go off, you made pancakes the night before Lent - on Pancake Tuesday.
As well as Easter Sunday you had already been to church on Holy Thursday, Good Friday (sometimes twice), and if your parents were mean, Easter/Holy Saturday. Obviously you deserved a reward. So after mass on Easter Sunday, Lent ended and in a throwback to what you were denied, you got one large chocolate egg that split in two. It was hollow with a little token packet of candy inside. Your parents gave you your egg.
That’s it. No dying. No hunting. No baskets. No peeps. No carrots. No rabbit.
Good Friday was a very austere day. A national holiday everybody was off work, but all the pubs were closed. This made the grown-ups mean so as kids you were not allowed to play out on the streets between the holy hours of noon and three. Being seen to be happy was frowned on. You were, after all, at a funeral, a funeral attended by a nation.
This was my Easter. The Sunday was a time to rejoice and celebrate the resurrection of our Lord by eating lots of chocolate. Nowadays the kids get chocolate BMWs and chocolate packs of Celtic Tigers as far as I can tell.
Eolaí gan Fhéile:
Easter was a religious holiday of great importance, that focused mainly on the religious aspects.
However on Easter Sunday, my family had a tradition on Easter Sunday of seeing who could eat the most boiled eggs at breakfast!! There were 8 kids in my family and we had a rating system where regular hen eggs counted as one point and duck eggs counted as two. Inevitably my younger brother seemed to win as he seemed to have ‘the stomach of a horse’ and could eat numerous duck eggs!!!
…and then the gas from the consumption of hard boiled eggs forced evryone to move apart for a few days. Right?