Post #976744

Ah, Easter eggs and Easter bunnies... We certainly had Easter eggs. Both the painted chicken egg variety, and the egg-shaped chocolate filled paper boxes, but I don't recall the Easter Bunny to feature all that commonly - except of course in the chocolate and toy stuffed care packages that the great aunt in Germany sent us. Plenty of foil wrapped hare shaped chocolate in those. But before that, on Maundy Thursday, it was the day of trick-or-treating. Dress up as a påskkärring (Easter witch/hag) and beg the neighbors for candy. Also belonging to this season would be the day that in English apparently is called Lady Day, but in Swedish through some linguistic quirk (folk etymology? Mondegreen? Mishearing?) changed name into våffeldagen ("waffle day") which of course needs to be celebrated appropriately. (Cream and jam!) To make it even better, that's also the day when the cranes were supposed to arrive from their winter vacation (no, not those cranes, the flying ones!) to my part of the country. If you lived further north, you just might have had to wait another week for the birds to arrive. If you managed to not scare away the poor bird (staying up past sunset the night before would definitely scare it off), and had remembered to hang up a (big) sock by the bed, it just might have filled with candy overnight. Now, there are parts of the country where the cranes have forgotten this important task, and if so, I'm sorry to say, hanging up the sock might not actually yield anything.