spring celebration

Yesterday we celebrated the festival of Eostar (the Spring Equinox). Ok, so we were a day late -- the Equinox was technically on Thursday. But since I had to work on Thursday evening, we pushed our all-day-and-night festivities off to Friday.

We had our friends T and B over during the afternoon, and I told a story about the goddess Ostara (and the magic rabbit that lays colorful eggs). Then we had an egg hunt, and dyed eggs as well. In the evening, T and B headed for home, and The Map Man joined us for a wonderfully festive time around the fire (indoors, as the North Wind hasn't quite given up yet, and the weather was just brutal outdoors), eating, playing games, singing songs, and telling stories, including a recitation of the Enki Seasonal Poem, "Princess Spring". We then climbed into sleeping bags and nodded off by the dying fire.

I didn't get any pictures of the evening activities, as it was pretty dark due to a timely power-outage, but here's some pics of the afternoon festivities. We dyed the eggs with tissue paper -- first we ripped colorful tissue paper into small bits and soaked it in water. Then (as the kids demonstrate above) we wrapped hard-boiled eggs tightly with the soaked tissue paper.

We then let the eggs rest for an hour while the dye transferred from the tissue paper to the egg shells. I actually liked the tissue-paper wrapped eggs the best, and we discuss doing this as a paper-mache project next year instead.

An hour later, here's the finished eggs (they looked better than this, the camera washed out a lot of the color). Some of the colors transferred better than others, so I feel a science experiment coming on.... we also discovered that pieces of crepe paper transferred the dye better than the tissue paper did.

The kids on their chilly egg hunt. Brrrr, but it was cold! It may officially be spring now, but our weather just doesn't seem to know that!




The boys explore (and sample) the contents of their eggs.

It was a very lovely festival, given that it was sort of thrown together at the last minute. See Wednesday's post about why it's hard for me to just declare it "Spring" and really "feel" it. But there is something very reassuring to me about the fact that, even totally lacking in organizational motivation, I can still manage to pull something nurturing together! Reminds me that my kids are getting everything they need even if I can't always be "on my game".