Explore Skåne: Easter in Åhus. // Hiking by the beach.
A quiet Easter in Åhus.
Traditional Latvian egg painting in Malmö with Liga and Malin.
Growing up this Easter was my favourite celebration (not the Christmas) and kind of still is. Also we recieved gifts on the Easter morning, but we had to go and find them! Easter is colourful and during the spring time when you can feel in the air that the fresh changes are coming! Despite the big heaps of snow at some years in my childhood, Easter days still felt like the end of winter. As we know Easter doesn't have a specific date, they jump between march and april, so, sometimes even at the end of april we had a lot of snow in Latvia.
Latvians have many amazing fun traditions for Easter. In Sweden it sounds and looks just another "days off" or for some another reason to just have a drunken party. In Latvia it's rarely when somebody does not celebrate Easter. You don't have to celebrate-celebrate, but everyone will eat an egg (sorry, vegans, I don't eat egg, but I do paint them for Easter) with salt (superstitious thingy as latvians are) and go to swings - small and big, young and old, and do the egg fight circle. In my adulthood I started the tradition of waking up early before sunrise and going to a spring-water to wash my face. It means that your skin will be good all year, and believe or not but those years when I did it, my skin was good in comparing how usually it was with my allergies and so.
Anyway, and then some people do the celebration at the parks or in town organized by folklore groups. There you can find wider range of Easter games, hear more laughter and see more happy latvians (some even dressed as bunnies or in folk costumes). The rabbit idea must come from Western culture, as for Latvians Easter has more pagan traditions than Christian, but in every modern latvians household it is a bit of both mixed up doing this and that just because "it always has been this way". Some attend church and I have done it too, but not always. In comparision with Sweden, Latvian Easter is more oldschool, more traditional and more interesting. Of course, at some parts of Sweden you will hear about their traditions, but as I mainly live around cities, I don't see much the thing when kids dress up, and have that witch tradition going on. Here Latvian and Swedish pagan traditions differs, which is interesting fact.
The egg painting with natural material in Malmö.
Symbolizing it all ... a tiny globe, holding new life, a new beginning, a tiny miracle ... is the Easter egg. Easter, or Lieldienas, the Latvian tradition. A part of that tradition is the coloring of Easter eggs without any artificial food dyes. Through the year my granny collected the deep brown and wine red skins of onions, for coloring the eggs. On the day of the coloring, granny and I also collected from the outside in the yard and garden small pieces of nature - some flower, grass, leaves and some dry flowers, anything really. We also added buchkweat or rice, or any other hard food material, can use pasta too.. Basically, be creative! Then set a large pot to boiling, some people add the skins inside the pot, but in my family we didn't. Later in my adulthood life I started adding coffee grains or red cabbage or something, can google about it. My friend Liga also has her rituals and habits with the eggs, so, it differs to a family.
My family's tradition is to wrap up in a small blanket (old t shirt or so) all the nature bits, first the onion skin, then add the pieces of nature, then put the egg and add another layer of something on the side which stares at you, then try to wrap it up and close it with a long string. Not too strong, you don't want to crush the egg now! And keep doing it with all of them the same. We usually have two or three pots, one for the brownish, the other for blue or red-ish tones.
Here I found a video how to colour eggs latvian style:) check it out here.
Åhus.
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