The Scary Easter Egg

"Fu huo jie" is the Chinese name for Easter.

One of the things that I love about the USA and China collectively is that there are so many holidays and they celebrate every single one.  I suppose its due to the 'she'll be right mate' attitude of Australians but for the most part, we tend to celebrate the bare minimum of holidays and then mostly we focus on the food and not really on any frivolous decorations or activities (the exception being Christmas but we'll talk about that some other time).  

I've decided, I really like the frivolous decoration and activities.  I'm not very good at them yet but its a fun tradition that I'd like to continue -- even here in China. 

My friend runs a little playgroup here twice a month and the date just happened to fall on Easter Saturday.  So I thought it would be fun to colour eggs and do an Easter egg hunt at the park.  So we painted our eggs up and despite the rather dubious looking weather, headed off to the park to hide them for the kids.  Within minutes of arriving, we attracted quite the crowd.  The foreigners had arrived and everyone wanted to see what they would do!  Having anticipated this, we calmly sat and chatted for 15 minutes till the crowd finally dispersed and I could hide our eggs.  So all eggs hidden, all that was left was to wait for the kids to arrive -- and hope the rain would hold off. 

The first person to discover an egg was the kite selling lady.  After walking by it several times, she finally worked up the courage to take a better look...and promptly smashed it with her foot. She looked up to see our horrified faces and smiled (as one does after smashing someone else's Easter egg) and told us it would go bad if we left it here.  No kidding.  So there goes that egg.

Some girls came and sat right next to where I'd hidden another egg at the bottom of a tree.  One girl accidentally bumped the egg with her hand and screamed!  She told her friend it was an evil gee dan (egg) and began throwing rocks at it!  At this point it also started to rain.  Being sightly bemused up until the rock throwing point, my friend and I decided to gather our eggs and move the hunt back to her living room where hopefully our 'evil Easter eggs' would not frighten any more people.  Whodda thunk a simple, coloured, hard boiled egg could cause such a rucous!?!

Anyway, the kids had a blast finding and eating their eggs and doing all the other activities that we'd planned for them and their mothers!

Decorating their Easter baskets...

They took the hunting part very seriously...

Here's to the next holiday!!!