the traditional easter post

easter is really not my favourite holiday. in my experience it's always had a moody vacant air about it. partly because of the weather (it always seems to fall in-between seasons, no matter what the seasons are; or in any case determining whether it would rain or not on easter day always seemed more pressing than whether it was going to snow for christmas).
it took a while to realize that OF COURSE the whole easter-related ambiguity was connected to the religious celebration. orthodox easter firmly revolves around the midnight church service wherein ressurection is proclaimed and chanted. that is why you depend on good weather: cause you're going to stand for an hour in front of the church at night waiting to 'receive the light' and then you have to carry the lit candle into your home without it going out.
another thing, for me, was that the foretelling and betrayal and trial and crucifixion parts of the religious story were so intense and vivid in my mind, while the ressurection was just vague, like an afterthought. i got all spent onto the tragic event, so the joy of reversal was not palpable.
bot ok, i've always seen how it makes sense to celebrate this in spring.

finally, a sign of new life in montreal. pathetic, i know, considering it's past mid-april and in some other places i'm told about they have lilacs and tulips etc

and it's a time for firsts: like, the first time i'm painting eggs by myself.

ok, not painting. dyeing them with 'toxic dye', as promised, and then applying stickers sent by my mum to some of them. the stickering process, done in hot water for the stickers to cling properly to the shell, resulted in the dye going off the eggs. cue to lengthy conversations about where i might have gone wrong. as there are VERY MANY places where i probably went wrong, said conversations can turn pretty lively. 

i`m always trying hard (seriously) to maintain a balance between being silly in celebration and being dull in...non-involvment. usually the conflict is so internal you would have no clue about it if i didn't decide to tell you. all you can see is, for example, 4 very small cute chocolate animals

but i've been into chocolate shops examining all kinds of figures of various sizes, bags of chocolate eggs, i've considered deserts both traditional romanian and of other specific. i've harrassed the one romanian store in my neighbourhood with my inquiries about walnut cake. but in the end this is all i've got to show for it.

well mostly because i've already eaten the walnut cake i ended up buying. and the lamb chops. (it might be the first time in my life buying lamb too. and there are reasons why - i like it well enough, but it can stay a once-a-year meal).  

it's going to be harder to eat all the hard-boiled eggs i've got now, but i'm working on it.
so yes, here`s this springy/eastery display.

i've never done easter in canada before. mostly because i had other things to deal with at the time, i think. but also the way i'm looking at it is, i want to start doing it now because now i live here. this is where i live. and i have to do at least some of the traditional things because here i'm not surrounded by them so i can't take them for granted. and when a priest on easter night told me that, as a romanian immigrant, i was defined first and foremost by my religion, i only rolled my eyes a bit, but i didn't throw my shoe at him and walk out.

so yes, i went to church at midnight. this church is like a 7 minute walk from my place, which one might say is lucky, since there are like 5 romanian churches in all of montreal. honestly, i wasn't expecting much - if it had been empty and locked, i would've just gone back home. but it was SWARMING with people, man!! hundreds and...hundreds. (i'm not a good appreciator of crowd sizes). the weather was ok in that it wasn't outright freezing, or raining either. there were police cars supervising our gathering, and orderly lines to buy candles (bonus a special plastic item to protect the flames from the wind.)
most of us stayed only through the initial, and most important, part: the outside the church thing, which precedes the actual service. it was quick and efficient enough, though complete with singing 'christ has risen' and candle-lighting. apparently it's 100 years since the romanian community here started the building of the church, good to know. and then we prayed for various categories of people and for peace on earth, as follows:
- we pray for the queen!!! (sonia, i'd thought you'd like to know!) (and for no members or representatives of canadian government. just the queen.)
- while in romania people do pray for all the romanians abroad, apparently here we don't pray for those in romania.
- and obviously we pray for an archbishop (of the north american diaspora) who i hadn't heard of before.
it really sounded like an official acknowledgement that i was in another world. coming in the middle of the one ceremony i've attended here that linked me back to romania, it felt strange. interesting strange, i'll say.

and then we all filed back through the streets, with our candles. that must have been strange for whoever else was in the streets at midnight, just doing their non-orthodox things.

anyway, yay for the occasional ceremony