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| 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.
