Hyvää Pääsiäistä / Happy Easter!
Easter is something that I have been looking forward to here, because there are some very different traditions than we have in Canada. To start with, on the Sunday before Easter Sunday the younger kids all dress up and go from door to door with willow branches. The tradition is to dress up as a witch, kind of similar to our Halloween witches. They decorate willow branches with brightly coloured feathers, ribbons, or other things. Then they go around to people's houses, and just like trick or treating, they knock on the door and say "Virvon, varvon, tuoreeks tirveeks, tulevaks vuodeks, vitsa sulle, palkka, mulle!" (I wave a twig for a fresh and healthy year ahead, a twig for you, a treat for me). Then the children get candy, chocolate, or sometimes money, and they give away the decorated willow branch. There are some traditional foods that are quite different as well. For starters, mämmi. Mämmi is a really thick, dark, pudding that is made from rye. It is quite strong, and most people either love or hate it. I tried it twice, once a month or so before Easter, and then again on the Saturday over Easter weekend. While it is not my favourite as it is quite strong, I can eat it if there is enough cream over it. Another traditional food is Pasha, which is a thicker pudding, it is kind of creamy and sometimes can have little fruits inside of it. It is really hard to describe the taste, but it is good. I also had karjalanpaisti for dinner one night. That is a traditional Finnish meat stew that originates from Karelia, an area in the east of Finland. I made my mom's sugar cookies that we always have around Easter time, and we had lots of chocolate eggs. There were regular small Easter eggs, kinder eggs, and then the special, very Finnish one, is called Mignon, and it's from the main Finnish chocolate brand, Fazer. It is an egg with a real shell that it totally solid chocolate. It is kind of like a nougat instead of just chocolate, it's slightly softer. It was a lot of chocolate, I would not want to eat more than one, and even one was almost too much. But it was good, and kind of cool that it had a real eggshell around it that I had to take off like a normal egg. On Saturday I helped out at a theatre stand in a Easter Market in the old town in Naantali. There were only a few stands, it was pretty small, but it was fun. There were 6 of us from theatre, we were all dressed up. We had an Easter bunny, a witch, a cat, and a mother hen with two chicks. We were running a Lucky Wheel, so people could spin the wheel for free and get candy or a small prize, while at the same time we had posters up for the show. Some of the little kids were sooo happy and it was so much fun to make them happy. It was also nice to get to know a few of the people from the theatre that I didn't know very well. I spent Easter with my friend's family, because my host family was going up to visit my dad's mom, and I had to be at the theatre over the weekend. So I spent it with one of my friend's from theatre, and I know her mom quite well because she is the director. Her family was so welcoming and so nice, I had a really good time. They also had new kittens, one that was almost two weeks old and four that were around a week. They were so so cute! Spring is definitely here, and summer will be coming soon. The weather has gotten so much warmer, and there are lots of flowers starting to come! Comments are closed.
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AuthorHi! My name is Katerina, and I am on exchange in Finland for a year! Archives
April 2019
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