I hope my readers enjoyed my educational article about Greek Independence Day because I’m about to do it again on another important Greek holiday: Easter. Now, for most of you, this past Sunday you celebrated Easter. But for me and the rest of the Greek Orthodox community, we didn’t. So, you guessed it, I’m going to drop some knowledge about how we celebrate Easter and why we celebrate it on a different day.
If you’ve ever seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding, then you have a slight idea of what Greek Easter is like. There’s lamb, Greek foods, and desserts, and we play a game called tsougrisma. One of the main reasons Greek Easter is celebrated after the Easter that most of the world observes is because we follow a different calendar. Many Christians and Catholics fall under Westernized Christianity, while Orthodox Christians are under the Eastern Orthodox category of Christianity. Western Christians follow the Gregorian calendar, while Orthodox Christians follow the Julian calendar which was the first Christian calendar ever used.
Because of this difference, our Easter is a week after “American Easter” as I’ve always called it, but ever so often, our Easters will fall on the same day. Not only that, our Easter always falls the day after the last day of Passover. To us, the Last Supper that Jesus had with his disciples was the Passover meal. Shortly after the meal was finished, he was arrested, crucified, and resurrected. Western Easter typically happens before Passover is over. And as my mom always says, “You can’t celebrate the resurrection of someone if they haven’t died yet.” Ask any Greek and they’ll tell you that we have the “correct” Easter.
The way we celebrate Lent is different as well. I grew up going to Catholic school and most kids were told to give up one vice for forty days. Greeks take Lent to a whole other level. The beginning of Lent starts with a day called kithara defthera or Clean Monday. We eat foods and enjoy time with our family…and then the fun begins. While other Christians and Catholics don’t eat meat on Wednesday and Friday during Lent, Greeks and other Orthodox Christians can’t eat ANYTHING from an animal during Lent. No meat, no dairy, no fish. In fact, the only animal products we can consume are shellfish and octopus. The fast is broken on Easter, and y’all, I’m hungry. In my normal diet, I mainly consume fish with a little chicken so fasting isn’t terrible. But forty days without cheese is getting to me. April 8th can’t come soon enough.
Instead of dying our Easter eggs in fun pastel colors, the eggs are dyed a deep red to symbolize the blood of Jesus. I know -- totally not morbid. One egg is baked into a sweet Easter bread called tsoureki. While the rest are used to play the game I mentioned earlier called tsougrisma. It’s an egg cracking game where each person has to crack the other person’s egg. If your egg cracks, you’re out, but if it doesn’t, we move on to the next person. The winner of the game then gets good luck for the rest of the year.
