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?  

Pretzel Sunday

Have you ever given any thought as to why pretzels exist?

Luxembourg and America do pretzels entirely differently. In America, pretzels are mostly crispy and sold in every grocery store. They inhabit bowls of questionable cleanliness in bars all across the country. Desperate airline passengers nibble on them. When people gather to watch football on TV, pretzels are the Vice Presidents of the snack world--ready just in case something happens to the chicken hot wings. Special pretzel stores in malls sell chewy ones dredged in yellow processed cheese; sometimes dipped into mustard. Other special pretzel stores in malls coat them in multiple layers of chocolate and colorful sprinkles.

Most of all, there’s no story or tradition around them. Pretzels are like pigeons. They are nothing special; they just ARE.

Well, in Luxembourg, pretzels are fraught with meaning. Sure, one can still find meaningless crispy pretzels in the grocery stores. It’s the seasonal pretzel--that comes around only once a year--that is so interesting.

To set the stage, Lent is a 40-day stretch of sadness and repentance before the rejoicing of Easter morning. It starts the day after Mardi Gras (literally “Fat Tuesday”), on Ash Wednesday (February 25th in 2009). During Lent, early Christians were not allowed to eat any rich foods, and particularly eggs, butter, milk, meat or cheese during this time. They could eat fish and bread made from flour and water, however. (Which is not so coincidentally the ingredients of a pretzel).

The Lenten pretzel tradition has Roman Catholic roots that date back over a thousand years. According to The History of Science and Technology, by Bryan Bunch and Alexander Hellemans, "...an Italian monk [in 610 A.D.] invents pretzels as a reward to children who learn their prayers. He calls the strips of baked dough, folded to resemble arms crossing the chest, 'pretiola' ("little rewards")". Another source maintains that they called it ‘Bracellae’, the Latin word for “little arms.” Over time the pronunciation turned into ‘bretzel’.

Are we to believe these stories? You make the call; I won’t. However, to stoke the fires of discussion a little more, the Sunday before Ash Wednesday I gave my wife Cammy a pretzel. It wasn’t any old pretzel. It was about a foot across, had the texture of a sweet roll and was topped generously with white frosting and sliced almonds. It was...a romantic pretzel.

What possessed me to do this? The fact that it was “Pretzel Sunday” in Luxembourg. Apparently a tradition that arose around suffering has morphed into a romantic tradition. According to accepted practice, the boy (Eric) gives the girl (Cammy) a pretzel on Pretzel Sunday. If she approves of my pretzel and my romantic attentions, then she is obliged to give me an egg on Easter Sunday. It could be a real egg or a chocolate one. It could be plain or richly decorated. It’s up to her. To add even more confusion, in leap years the girl and the boy switch roles! (Sort of a Sadie Hawkins arrangement, so the boys had better be on their toes).

As Easter approaches the pressure mounts. To make things more dramatic, I shall continue the discussion using Rumsfeldic Questioning (kind of like Socratic Questioning, but more recent and with goofy epithets included):

Will I get an egg? Good golly, I should hope so.
Will it be out of the carton? Perhaps.
Could it be hardboiled? Possibly, for gosh sakes.
Might it be dyed a pretty color? My stars, wouldn’t that just be dilly!
Could it be a fancy chocolate egg? You bet.
And what does it really mean either way? Heavens to Betsy, who on God’s green earth really knows?

All I know is that everybody knows that you’re supposed to do it, but nobody (I’ve talked to) knows why. It’s enough to drive a man to drink. Which is what a lot of Luxembourgish men do. Starting at about 9 o’clock in the morning, when the malls open. Packs of them cluster around the little circular bars in the main mall walkways, like gamblers around a particularly generous blackjack table. When they are in full swing, there is much jovial chitchat and hoisting of beer. I call them the “Bofferding Boys”, after the local brewery.

But I digress.

On the surface, Pretzel Sunday sounds silly, maybe even sacrilegious. However, I would argue that it is far less so than the Easter Bunny. Or the gifting of live ducklings and bunnies, soon to be abandoned (or eaten). Not to mention plastic Easter baskets lined with plastic grass filled with the sugary horror of Cadbury eggs and the marshmallowy monstrosities known as Peeps.

At least pretzel and egg drama has a Christian origin and celebrates love and romance, instead of just celebrating the dollar.