Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Egg hunt and diet coke experiment

One of the perks of being welcomed into a family with a totally different set of holidays, traditions and customs, is that I get to experience many fun things the very first time, when I'm old enough to remember (and document!) it.
So this time, it was the hunt for Easter eggs.

[this part is for the Israelies, Americans may skip:
Unlike Passover eggs (which we dip in salt water to remind us of the Israelites crossing the 1.2m-deep Nile river, of course), Easter eggs come in many different colors. They are laid by the Easter Bunny, whose job is to hide candy and chocolate around the house, and lay eggs. Nobody knows what they represent, but since they look nice and colorful, nobody questions them. If the Easter bunny is too busy to lay eggs, parents and children help him in his task, by coloring fake chicken eggs with special colors. This is reported to be really fun, but somewhat addictive, so make sure you have a limited amount of eggs at home.]

The egg hunt started with a long debate, regarding the exact manner in which the eggs are to be hidden, and what scoring scheme will be applied. We considered a few options, including several rules adopted from the famous 'Khan' game (I am still waiting for Erin to write the full set of Khan rules!). Someone suggested to let the kids wait in the living room and hide all the eggs in the refrigerator. hmm. I wonder who that could have been. Eventually, we decided that each kid hides his own eggs, and then everybody gets to search for them together. DadK helped. He also helped us look for them later. Grady complained a lot, since he was not allowed to search.
The scoring scheme: one point for each egg you find + for each of your eggs you get a number of points according to the order of it's discovery. For example, if you found 6 eggs, and your eggs were the 1st, 3rd, 10th and 15th to be found, you get 4+1+3+10+15=33 points.

An old (and odd, if you ask me) tradition, is that the loser of the egg hunt has to dig a grave for the dead cat. It seems that every year, as the ground defrosts, it is customary to bury a cat. This time it was poor Bob, who waited for this occasion for almost a year. [add Bob's picture here]. After all the eggs were recovered, and the loser was declared (me), Ben and Matt dug the grave, and we all paid our respects to poor old Bob. I wonder who it's gonna be next year :S

Anyway, this is a picture of the back yard, in which we hid 12 colored eggs. Find the eggs!!!














... and the diet coke experiment should get it's own post on the blog, don't you think?

6 Comments:

At Wed Apr 19, 10:54:00 PM EDT, Blogger bk said...

About "crossing the 1.2m-deep Nile river", I don't think Grady has to worry about the beytsim (eggs) passing over the water. We had that taken care of when he was a puppy. Doesn't seem to bother him a bit, and that's a COOOOLD river! Inside joke Jymer, for the Israelis and the people who didn't have to work Easter weekend. I'll clue you in later...

 
At Thu Apr 20, 11:07:00 AM EDT, Blogger Sandy K. said...

The part about burying the cat is not exactly a national custom. It is specific to the Koester family, and we just had the one cat to bury, so Keren should not expect to bury a cat every Easter. Roy is getting worried.

 
At Thu Apr 20, 01:27:00 PM EDT, Blogger bk said...

Now Roy has incentive to start catching mice in the kitchen...we could easily make this a tradition.

I think the country could really get into this. Everyone knows somebody with a dead cat in their freezer. Maybe they have other dead things in their freezers they would like to bury.

 
At Thu Apr 20, 02:14:00 PM EDT, Blogger koesterk said...

What, are there people that didn't bury cats this weekend or something?
I did think that was custom.

 
At Thu Apr 20, 09:28:00 PM EDT, Blogger ERS said...

yes, and frozen cats also help to prevent freezer burn on 2.5 year old wedding cake, or maybe it was sooooo good because we actually buried the cake? MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM...KITTY KAT....aaghgha....drooling

 
At Fri Apr 21, 09:50:00 AM EDT, Blogger keren said...

nobody found any eggs yet?!?!?
i'm disappointed.
maybe i should have offered a prize for the winner...

click on the image to enlarge it.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home