Hello everyone. For this month I will talk about a special time that Polish people celebrate a lot: Easter. In Poland, Easter is the most important celebration of the year.
To start, the week before the Easter celebration, Polish people must meditate and enter into a period of joy. The Saturday morning, they decorate Easter eggs, cook food and bread. All of the preparation and the presents are put in a basket and brought to the church. For the egg decoration, you can soak them in beet juice, in spinach, in onion peels or you can decorate them with modern patterns. In Polish the name of this kind of eggs is « kraszanki ». The Sunday morning, for breakfast, they prepare and share some eggs. Polish people go to the church and pray.
To continue, the funniest tradition is the Monday morning where children and adults do a water fight, called in Polish : « smigus dyngus ». So you can wet someone by throwing water at him and he can’t be mad at you. This tradition is here to give good humor to people. If you don’t want to have a flood in your home you can do it with eggs. Groups of young people would go from one house to another and collect eggs to give to the poor. If the people don’t give something, you are guaranteed to be flooded . Water and eggs have a real signification: water is for purity and eggs symbolize life and renewal.
Then, two colors symbolize Easter in Poland: green and yellow. The green symbolizes fresh grass and yellow is for the sun and good days. So on the table, the dominant colors are yellow and green.
For the meal, there are a lot of different dishes, so a lot to eat, as often in Poland. They love to have a lot to eat!! The meal starts with the traditional Easter eggs. After that is the Paschal lamb, smoked ham, and barszcz (a Polish dish). There are a lot of desserts but a special one is a cake with a lot of butter and almond paste.
Of course every Polish family has their own traditions but these are the most common.
I hope you learned a bit more about Poland.
Bye, see you next month.
- Clémence Palanque - Poland
