Xристос воскрес! (Kristos vaskress)
Воистину воскрес! (Vye eestonu vaskress)
Jesus is risen!
He is risen indeed!
Today is Orthodox Easter. We had a really neat experience, celebrating Easter in Ukraine. It was so sweet and neat. I'm including a video of part of one of the songs we sang this morning. I didn't think of videoing until halfway through, and then I didn't hold terribly still. Sorry about that.
Here's a list of Easter differences for you:
1. No Easter bunny. They think it's fairly ridiculous. I agree with them. The Brassart clan does Easter sheep.
2. No Easter candy. There are Easter cakes instead. These Easter cakes are called "paska," and they are EVERYWHERE. Hannah, Rachel, and I were adventurous the other day and bought some. They look like cupcakes, but they taste more like Wednesday-night-fellowship-church-rolls. With rock hard icing and sprinkles on top. The day after we bought some, our friend, Oksana, made us one (sans raisins, thankfully). She also decorated some eggs for us.
Oksana's cake and eggs
3. They decorate eggs much like we do, but they seem to go less for dye and more for fancy wrappers. I'm a huge fan of the wrappers!
4. There are Easter baskets here, but they are very different from ours. Easter here is very much like at home: many people only darken the door of the church on Easter. The Orthodox churches that stand empty for the majority of the year are full of people on Easter. Families load up baskets with the food and vodka they will eat and drink on Easter. Then, they take the food to the church and have the priests bless it.
I hope that your day was blessed, whether or not you celebrated Easter today. Hope you enjoy the really shaky, blurry video!
2 comments:
They sing songs you know the English equivalent of? Totally no fair. Do you know how hard it is to act involved in the service when it's Arabic script up on the screen and you can't even mouth the words? Time to get to studying...
1. They sometimes sing songs we have equivalents of.
2. We can never remember the English words no matter how familiar we are with the songs. Ever. Ask Hannah or Rachel. The Ukrainian and Russian dominates, of course, so there's no chance of remembering the English.
3. Cyrillic isn't Arabic, but it's still pretty hard to follow when they're going fast. And, they randomly switch between Ukrainian songs and Russian songs. There's a difference between languages. Trust me, it's no walk in the park...
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