Easter Eggs and Clay Birds

When I (and perhaps you) last tuned in, I was wondering what (if any) egg Cammy would be giving me on Easter Sunday morning. What with computer issues and general laziness, I guess I left everyone on tenterhooks about what happened. 

In our ten years together, we have tried to give each other romantic Easter baskets. It started on Easter weekend of 2000, when I proposed to her on a bluff overlooking a California beach. Present to witness the occasion were a big diamond, a picnic lunch and  Easter baskets. So we have this history around Easter beyond the solemn and joyful religious side.

Jumping to the present, what I discovered here was that Easter baskets don’t exist (as far as I know, after much searching) in Luxembourg. But there are hordes of chocolate eggs and bunnies, stuffed with treats.

So I was very happy to have handed to me on Easter morning, with a cup of Starbucks coffee, an extravagant dark chocolate egg. Yummy. Inside the egg were dark, milk and white chocolate eggs, chickens and bunnies, each with a ganache filling. Yummy indeed.

Easter in Luxembourg is quiet and fairly reverent, as it should be. Everything (besides a few gas stations) is closed. People stock up on Good Friday for the long weekend, because the morning after Easter is also a holiday in Luxembourg. If you want that local Luxembourgish leg of lamb, you’d better buy it on Maundy Thursday or Good Friday. 

On Easter Monday, although stores are still closed, the streets of downtown Ville de Luxembourg are flooded with people visiting the booths of the annual Easter street fair. 

In the past, only a few booths were set up behind the Grand Duke’s castle, on Marche aux Poissons (Fish Market Street). They would sell homemade clay bird whistles. Today, there are dozens of booths along Marche aux Poissons, and many dozens more all over the downtown area. For sale are bird whistles of numerous shapes and colors, other arts and crafts, personal odds and ends of a flea market nature. And that doesn’t even include the many food and drink booths.

Ingeniously, to make the whistles sound more birdlike, they are filled with water. The bubbly chirp that results is strikingly realistic. Walking down Fish Market Street is like walking into a particularly vociferous menagerie. It’s quite cacophonous and great fun. 

We spent a good half hour watching folk dancers, whose hoofing vaguely resembled a  polka. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know squat about the polka, even after years of sketchy ballroom dance classes at various community colleges and Elks Clubs. Sadly, my moves in the ballroom have always more resembled those of an inside linebacker than those of Fred Astaire, despite all the lessons. There’s more lurking and hulking than gliding going on. But their moves looked familiar. And kind of fun, even with the costumes. I don’t know why, but there is something irresistable about folk dancers, especially when they are visibly having so much fun. They were truly grinning and laughing to each other much of the time. I attribute that to the live band with accordions! Wouldn’t you grin a little if several thousand people were watching you dance to accordion accompaniment?