Easter Traditions.

It's Saturday night, Palm Sunday Eve. While preparing for tomorrow's birthday dinner for EJ, my oldest grandson, many thoughts have crossed my mind today, reminiscing about Easter traditions which passed from generation to generation in my family. They have changed as time went by, and they are still changing, due to various factors including changes in culture, language, and the decade itself in which we live in with our children and their children born in a different place from ours. I still can smell the palms, the scented flowers we carried to the church on Palm Sunday with our Grandmother. I remember how busy the week before Easter was, when our mother, aunts, cleaned their houses throughly, cooked and baked for the perfect Easter Sunday dinner at Grandmother's house. It used to be a large banquet table dressed with a new cloth embroidered tablecloth, well decorated and  filled with special dinner, served in special china plate settings, cakes, pies and puddings. The village priest would come on Easter Monday to bless the house with the cross of Christ, and again the table would be filled with desserts, the traditional almonds, and a certain sweet liquer served in special glasses. I many times wondered as a kid, how could the priest try all these cakes, and drink all this liquer by visiting every single house in the village. It was fun for me, my sisters and my friends to follow the priest and his assistants through all the streets and stop at every family home, to try a new different pastry. Later when we moved to US, and adapting to the new country, became a necessity of survival and financial independence for my parents, we had to filter within us the new customs and traditions of the new land, and merge them with our native ones. My mother would continue to prepare a nice dinner in the same manner she always did in the old country, and cook the traditional food for every specific holiday. She would with our help as teenagers maintain the house cleaned and decorated accordingly. At the same time, and subconsciously we would integrate the new traditions from the new adopted country when we live in now. However, that Sunday routine to the church on Sundays, wasn't as frequent as when Grandmother was alive. We have followed our catholic religion and remember deeply our roots, and try to live by them, but the practicing of it, has been unfortunately minimal. I remember the candle processions and the vigils at our church, and I miss them so much. I was brought up in a catholic school, and then it was our life, our way.

About 43 years later, my sisters and I are doing the same thing, alternating and trying to celebrate these holidays with love and the way we have always remembered them, while allowing our descendants to bring in some of their own. So far it has been a good mixture of things, of accepting new offers and providing old tastes to everyone. Our tables get decorated as well, but not only with the old traditional multi colored almonds for Easter, but also with chocolate eggs. We have welcomed the american way belonging to our younger generation, but we are still showing them how it used to be done by presenting food items we make ourselves or buy in the local Portuguese food markets. Our children and their own children know they will always be raised and grow up in a variety of  holiday traditions to be cherished by all! And I know they are creating their own memories, whether it is a Easter Egg Hunt on Easter Sunday, decorating them, or going to their own church with their Mom and Dad on Palm Sunday and smell their own scented palms. Even though we always lived in the Portuguese community here in US, where candle processions still take place at Easter Time, and churches offer the same services, sadly to say I don't practice it the way I always did as a kid, but respect it by always remembering it with my Grandmother in my mind.

This year I am celebrating Palm Sunday by integrating my grandson's birthday and having some family over at my house, including my mother who continuously reminds us of her own holidays at her mother's house. She gets so focused in that time, she practically forgets to talk about the holidays she spent with us decades later. I think she firmly believes that we are the ones who must talk about those holidays with our own children.  My dinner may be different from my grandmother's or even my mother's, but the table with be decorated with a dual culture and tradition, and everyone will savour it and wish EJ a very nice birthday. I am sure my daughter will always remember our family holidays but being second generation in US, it won't be as easy for her children to continue in the same way, as she married an american young man  from another heritage. It will be indeed interesting as time goes by, to witness combined multi traditions taking over, instead of just a single or a dual. It will be a much richer generation, a generation of many dreams, ideals, followers and brand new Holiday Traditions. For now...

Happy Palm Sunday! Happy Easter! ♥