EASTER IN ZEHLENDORF

Easter reminds me of my childhood when I lived in Zehlendorf, the then west side of Berlin.

Easter preparations in our family started long before Easter Sunday. Weeks in advance, my mom would remember not to break the eggs when baking a cake, but to blow them out.

Blowing eggs out is not an easy task. You poke a little hole in each end of the egg and then blow as hard as you can into one hole, hoping the egg comes out of the other side.

Since it was very strenuous, other members of the family had to help in blowing. You can imagine how many eggs survived this harsh treatment, especially in my hands, as I was only 4 years old. But it was fun! If we didn't have any whole eggs to show for, we tried again another time.

These blown out eggs were rinsed and dried, and on a quiet afternoon, we, my mom and my younger sister and brother would paint them in different colours and hang them onto a pussy willow bouquet. This made a pretty decoration on our Easter Sunday's breakfast table.

It gave me great pleasure to be the chosen one of three children to help decorate the Easter breakfast table. That morning my mom would boil five eggs. Eggs were a treat in those days in my family! After they were ready, we drew faces on the shells to make them look like bunnies - that was a lot of fun! Then we would all sit down and enjoy a table full of fresh warm buns, home-made jam and the eggs.

After breakfast my parents would invite us to go on an Easter hunt; If the weather permitted it, we had it outside, otherwise it was indoors. I remember that the ones that were the most fun were the ones in the garden. We would look beside the trees and inside the bushes to see if there were any signs of the Easter bunny having been there; And sure enough, after a while, we would come up on some yummy chocolate Easter eggs, with nugat or marzipan filling. Sometimes the Easter bunny even left some clothes or toys for us.

At noon time we had a festive hot meal that we enjoyed with my grandmother and my uncle and his family. We then often went for a walk through the woods around one of the big lakes in Berlin. It was great to run around in the woods. To our surprise we would find the chocolate eggs throughout the woods ... was the Easter bunny here today too?

At the end of the day, after light dinner, we would have a big fire in the garden, where all the branches and bushes that had accumulated from the fall were burned, as we all watched on.

It was a spectacular ending for a great day in the circle of our friends and family. In bed I would fall asleep with the warm feeling of happiness, and wandering how I could have missed seeing this hard working Easter bunny all day! Katrin Wolters was born and lived in West Berlin - Zehlendorf, spent most of her youth in Luneburg, and came to Canada in 1980, and is presently a German Heritage Language teacher.

This article was originally published in Cross Cultures Magazine in Volume 1 - Issue 3 - 1992. Unauthorized copying, distribution or other usage without express written permission of the publisher is prohibited.