Marking the passage of time with ritual is important as a means of continuity as well as a good reason to celebrate. No baskets full of fake green grass, plastic eggs or chocolate bunnies in our household. Yet we have always colored eggs. We hid them when we had wee ones, but figure it doesn't make sense to hide them from ourselves...yet. We do color them! (I even colored eggs when I was alone due to Michael staying with his parents when Clyde was first diagnosed with cancer.) I like to think of it as a connection with my German grandmother, as Oester was a Germanic goddess of spring and fertility, and gave us oestrus as a fun word to know and use. It also gave us the word "Easter."

All of our chicken eggs are brown, so we have been saving duck eggs for Sunday. The interesting thing was that the duck eggs took on a greenish hue naturally when we boiled them. We still dyed them anyway.

The beauty of dyed eggs is that we then get lovely colored deviled eggs for dinner. Because we REALLY like deviled eggs, we only get to have them once a year. Look for my deviled egg recipe, to be posted soon.