EASTER EGGS AND THE EASTER CHICKEN

With my brother and sister, I'm the one in the middle

 Growing up, I didn’t understand a lot about Easter.  I knew, at least, that it had to do with the death of Christ and his rising from the grave.  What chickens and eggs had to do with it was beyond me.  But I remember hunting for Easter eggs after church.  For us Armenians, Easter eggs were tinted a reddish brown color using onion skins or yellow using turmeric.  For orthodox Armenians, this tied into lent and abstaining from meat products.

As Armenian children, we grew up playing a traditional egg cracking game at Easter. Apparently, the onion skin dye helped fortify the egg for this game.

One person would try and crack the other person’s egg and the last egg standing would win a prize.  We had all sorts of tricks we would come up with believing they would ensure us to be the one to win.  First you had to pick the best egg, if you picked wrong, you were the first to go, we were sure.  Then there was the angle of hitting the other person’s egg.  Everyone was sure they had the best trick to last until the end.  It was always a lot of fun.

On one particular year, we were given baby chicks from our parents.  We enjoyed our baby chicks until they grew to be chickens.  Then one day, my grandfather announced that his American born grandchildren needed to learn about the ways of the Old Country.  Into our house he marched and proceeded to appropriate one of my mother’s kitchen knives.  We were going to learn how to butcher, feather, and eat our pet chickens!

This was quite unusual and even somewhat horrifying, but worse was the reaction of both my grandmother and my mother. I was only about 5 years old, but I will forever remember the two of them carrying on and berating my grandfather.  My mother was absolutely incensed that he was using her kitchen knife which wasn’t very sharp and she was convinced he was going to ruin it.  My grandmother was furious and was scolding him in Turkish.  I have no idea what she said but it sure didn’t sound good and she was definitely angry.  My grandmother was a feisty thing and she could really let my grandfather have it.  No doubt she was trying to stop him and was telling him he was not doing this thing properly.  Yet, as feisty as my grandmother was, my grandfather was equally as stubborn and the procedure of cutting off the chicken’s head began.  Or, I should say, the “sawing” of the chicken’s head began.

My grandfather suffered from an illness that made his hands shake.  The combination of the shaky hands and the dull knife meant for a rather long, arduous and pitiful ending for our poor chicken.  Nevertheless, we dutifully paid as much attention as we could for our lesson about “the old country” in spite of the distraction created by my mother and my grandmother’s tirades.

Later on as we sat down for dinner, I remember eating most everything except this strange chicken wing with a few pieces of feather still stuck to it.  I seemed to have forgotten about the horror show of the morning, so when I told my sister I didn’t want the chicken she reminded me that it was the very chicken that grandpa had crucified earlier.  I told my sister, “I’m so glad I didn’t eat it then!”  I’m not sure that I learned anything about the Old Country from this experience, but I think I may have gained some interesting life experiences from my grandparents.