Preparing for Easter in Scotland

Today is Easter, but I started to think about preparing for it a few weeks ago.  I know, I'm supposed to have been reflecting on Easter for all of Lent, but my earnest concern about Easter traditions only started a little prior to Palm Sunday.   Thinking about Palm Sunday made me miss Central Congregational Church in Providence, and all their Palm Sunday celebrations - waving palms, procession with a teenager plying Jesus, and even Jasper the donkey. Last week at Palm Sunday here, I ended up working in the creche (nursery) during church, so I couldn't be sure about the palm-waving, but there was definitely no donkey. I saw small palm branches woven into crosses (pre-woven, not even a palm leaf to weave yourself, or teach your kids how to make the cross out of it).

For Easter itself, I thought about the American traditions, and then ran into Scottish roadblocks:

1) Dyeing eggs. Okay, didn't even really anticipate this one: almost all eggs in the US are white, right. you could get brown eggs if you wanted, but they're not as common. Not so here.  Eggs are uniformly brown. No white eggs to be found, even in a big store. So how do you dye eggs when they are all brown? I asked Paul to get stickers, so we sticker-ed our eggs this year:

 

2) Hunting for (plastic) eggs hidden by the Easter Bunny.  Okay, we were doing better on this one. The trickiest part was the plastic eggs (which Paul found and bought, although he lamented the whole time the three dozen plastic eggs we had left in the storage space in Virginia).  But Easter candy was plentiful - gummy bunnies (Haribo has a monopoly over here on gummy things), Cadbury mini-eggs (not the creme eggs although those are also everywhere), jellybeans - and we have a garden (yard) for hiding eggs.  So what if the Scottish neighbors thought we were a bit nuts, yelling "Eggs!" and hiding and re-hiding them in the garden between 9 and 10 am (see video clip below). We didn't find any bit Easter Egg hunts (like at church in Providence).  The one thing we did discover was a Scottish penchant for egg-rolling. At school, Audrey's teacher and classmates told her she had to roll a big egg down a hill, "like rolling the stone away from the grave" on Eastern Sunday morning. And some friends of ours did plan to go egg-rolling first thing (like 8 am) on Easter. We have the big plastic egg that the 36 small plastic eggs came in, so we thought we might roll that down the hill...but at church, a girl (8 or 9 years old) came up to me to ask if Audrey wanted to roll her (Cadbury chocolate) egg down the hill with her.  I said sure, and later Audrey told me that they had rolled an egg for the girls and an egg for the boys, and when they rolled down the hill, guess what, they broke, and she got to eat 3 pieces of chocolate...so maybe this is the point :-) 

3) Eat peeps. This is really more of a my-father Easter tradition, but with two marshmallow-loving kids, it seems like a good tradition to uphold.  Except there are no peeps in Scotland. Cadbury has a virtual lock on the market, and they don't make peeps. At church I found pink marshmallow bunnies, but it wasn't the same. No chicks. No sparkly sugar. Just not the same!

Enough for now - off to roll the plastic egg down the hill, which Audrey is currently taping with scotch tape (sellotape, here) so that it will be able to survive its rolling journey in one piece!

Blog bonus: Here is the 30-second video of her rolling the egg. Tried to put it on Facebook but it came up as a black screen (audio but no video) every time...

Thank You Asli! Turkish Delights By Post

 So I arrived home from work today, and Paul said, "Your Turkish delight arrived today, and you owe Asli a very nice thank-you note because she sent a lot more than that!" So: a full blog post to say thank you!

Some of you may remember me complaining about the British version of Turkish delight in a Facebook status (although the ladies in my singing group tell me I haven't given it a fair chance, having only tried the "raspberry goo" flavor - there are apparently others). Anyway, Asli's response to my complaint was to say, "give me your address in Scotland, I'll send you some real Turkish delight." So what could I do? I gave her my address and cautioned her about the vagaries of Royal Mail (stopping anything that seems to be worth more than a few dollars, or pounds, or in this case lira.) She assured me she was a mailing pro.

 So today, I come home and there it is, a veritable Turkish confectionery feast. Two flavors of Turkish Delight (raspberry-ish with pistachios, and something Paul and Audrey claim is ginger, but I think might be "plain"?) that are both yummy (Paul says "Like a gummy. But a really GOOD gummy.") In addition, candy almonds (in the US we would call them Jordan Almonds but I guess Turks would not call them that). Plus chocolate-coated pistachio-something. Plus a wafer-y pistachio thing. Plus three kinds of hard candy, one of which is cinnamon and two of which I haven't tried yet, though Paul says the yellow one with the inclusions (nougat? I say, but he says no) is his favorite.

Audrey (5) liked the pistachio Turkish Delight. Claire (2) preferred the maybe-it's-plain-or-ginger flavor. We didn't show them the other treats...yet.

So thank you, Asli. you have definitely changed my mind about Turkish delight, and at the same time made me want to come visit Turkey even more than I already did (although Paul told Audrey that Turkey is where all the turkeys come from so she may be somewhat disappointed if we make it there and there aren't a lot of gobbling fowl about).

I want to close with one word about the power of Facebook. I currently research technology and social media and there is much hue and cry about how Facebook is declining with teens (and intimating that it is declining overall). But if I didn't have a connection to Asli on Facebook, my lament about Turkish delight would have fallen on deaf ears (or at least the ears of people who didn't know what I was talking about) instead of turning into a delicious Turkish confectionery surprise for all of us!