On the first Easter Sunday Jesus appeared to some women first …
Luke 24:1-5 New Revised Standard Version
1. But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they went in, they did not find the body. 4 While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. 5 The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.
At this morning’s virtual service at Trinity Church Revd Ian Griffiths said “On that first Easter morning, it was as if the whole world were sleeping when the most amazing thing happened.”
This Easter morning I am looking out of the window, and see new leaves on the trees. There is a house in East St Helen Street in Abingdon where there is a display of blossoms and flowers and palm crosses, that many people can enjoy walking past.
The lockdown is a strange return to almost forgotten days of family life. Our grown up children are back with us because of the lockdown. We decorated Pace Eggs with flowers, and then wrapped them in onion skins and string, and boiled them – as is the custom in my wife’s home town Ulverston. The picture above shows a Pace Egg in the Pitts Rivers Museum in Oxford – a few miles from Abingdon.
My parents came from the Lake District and on Easter Saturday we made eggs like this. They were called Pace Eggs. We made them by wrapping onion skins round hard boiled eggs, leaving them overnight and in the morning the eggs would be striped with different colours. Then we rolled them down a nearby hill and the most intact egg was the winner. Then we ate them he for Easter breakfast.
I think it is important at this time of year to appreciate the true meaning of Easter.
Enjoy chocolate sensibly!
One of the wonderful things about the Abingdon Blog is that, unlike most of the newspapers and media, it is not scornful about religion but treats people’s faith with respect. Thank you, Backstreeter, for giving us news about church activities that we don’t get elsewhere.
We had an alternative to rolling decorated boiled eggs downhill, R, where two contestents tapped their eggs together in turn until one of them cracked … sort of ‘conkers’ with eggs
Sometimes these individual duels were part of a larger (schoolyard) knockout competitiion where the sole survivor was the Grand Champion..
I’ve come across people from different parts of the country, and in places abroad, who played this game when kids. In the North East it was called ‘jarping’.
In later years I’ve wondered whether the odd marble egg ‘ringer’ was slipped into the competition.
Just checked and … Wow! … there’s a video on jarping:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TsEEi0WctU
Next year we should have a multi-event Abingdon Egg Olympiad.