Easter

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Dr. Goodword
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Easter

Postby Dr. Goodword » Sat Apr 19, 2014 10:28 pm

• Easter •

Pronunciation: ee-stêr • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun, proper

Meaning: The Christian holiday celebrating Christ's resurrection from the dead.

Notes: You might find it strange that we celebrate Christ's resurrection with rabbits and eggs. As in so many other cases (for example, mistletoe and Santa Claus for Christmas), these symbols have non-Christian origins. Because new life emerges from eggs, they have long been a symbol of the rebirth of nature in spring after its winter-long death. The Persians, Greeks, and Romans interwove this symbol into their spring-time celebrations.

In Play: Easter existed long before Christianity as a festival of spring and fertility (see Word History). That is why Easter is not directly associated with the date of the resurrection, but the day of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. The hare (now the rabbit) and the egg appeared as symbols of fertility in the original celebrations and continue today despite their pagan heritage. We wish all our Christian friends a happy Easter and our Jewish friends a happy Passover.

Word History: Easter descended from Proto-Germanic Austron, the goddess of the sunrise, rebirth, and fertility, Eastre in Old English. The root goes back to aus- "to shine" in Proto-Indo-European, the language from which most India Indian and European languages derive. Aus- appears, with the S replaced by an R, in Latin Aurora, the Roman goddess of dawn. It is also at the root of German Österreich "eastern kingdom". Today it is the name of Austria in German. Most Western European languages use a variant of Hebrew Pesach "Passover" for "Easter", as in Latin Pasche, French Pâques, Spanish Pascua, Swedish Påsk, but also Russian Paskha.
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Slava
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Re: Easter

Postby Slava » Sun Apr 20, 2014 2:28 pm

In Russia paskha is also a dessert made at Easter time. Usually served with a special bread, kulich.
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Re: Easter

Postby Perry Lassiter » Sun Apr 20, 2014 6:43 pm

My understanding isthat the date of Easter is linked to Passorver, which is irregular because the Jewish calendar was lunar, adding a whole extra month as needed. That has somehow got linked to the equinox.
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Re: Easter

Postby Dr. Goodword » Sun Apr 20, 2014 11:26 pm

We had visitors today, so my wife made paskha and kulich. Paskha is a cottage cheese based dessert with dried fruits and nuts: raisins, citron, chopped almonds. Flavored with vanilla. It also contains a cup of heavy whipping cream. (Yum!)

Kulich is a bread with candied fruits: orange rind, citron, raisins, almonds, flavored with almond extract and vanilla. Kulich is usually baked in a tall cylindrical pan like a coffee can, so that it rises out of the pan and puffs out like the towers on a Russian church.
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Re: Easter

Postby LukeJavan8 » Mon Apr 21, 2014 1:08 pm

Happy Passover, Easter and Spring to everyone.
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call_copse
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Re: Easter

Postby call_copse » Tue Apr 22, 2014 6:35 am

Kulich looks nice; in what ways (apart from origin) might this be distinguished from a panettone? (If you are not familiar with this cake it is an Italian cake eaten at Christmas, only recently popular in the UK)
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Re: Easter

Postby Philip Hudson » Sun Apr 27, 2014 7:24 pm

The Church has baptized many local customs and rituals into the Christian faith. Some go a bit far. The Lady of Guadalupe is a case in point. Who can doubt that it was a vision of an Amerind goddess that Juan Diego imagined he had seen? The roses on the serape bit was surely a ruse. The results have been, to their detriment, a syncretized and thus watered down faith for many Hispanics.
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