Sunday, April 24, 2011

Happy Easter/Joyeuses Pâques

love bunnies
Joyeuses Pâques is French for Happy Easter…and as many of you sit down to your festive holiday brunch,  here’s a bit of the history of how eggs, rabbits, and dyed marshmallow peeps came to be associated with the occasion. Yes, today is when Christians celebrate the resurrection of Christ, but the holiday actually has roots that go much further back. Back to when the coming of Spring symbolized a sort of re-birth after a long, hard Winter.

To the ancient Egyptians and Romans, eggs were a symbol of vitality and it was customary to offer painted eggs as gifts to commemorate the changing of the seasons. The tradition was reinstated by the Christians as a way to make use of all the eggs that had been stockpiled during Lent when the eating of meat and eggs was forbidden.  Children immediately took to the challenge of finding the brightly colored eggs that had been hidden. The French explanation for how the eggs got there went like this: normally the church bells rang each day to invite the faithful to services, but during the week before Easter, the bells were silent from Thursday evening until Saturday evening. That’s because the church bells had flown to Rome to get eggs. On their return back, they would drop the eggs so that they could be found by good little girls and boys! By the eighteenth century, French children were finding eggs that had been emptied and re-filled with chocolate.
In Germany, the eggs were left by a hare or rabbit…a long time symbol of fertility and re-birth. German settlers to the United States brought this custom with them and voila…the Easter Bunny is born! Other immigrants brought with them several related customs…like burying a colored Easter egg at the foot of a vine or row of crops in the hopes that the crop yield will be quicker and greater…or believing that if an egg is buried for 100 years, the yolk will turn into a diamond!
With the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, Easter-related molds were produced and mass-marketed. The molds were both for general culinary purposes…like this rabbit-form glass mold…probably for pâté….


OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA…but many more were produced for making chocolate…like this wonderful egg with a man-in-the-moon motif…
eastereggmaninmoon 
…or an egg to commemorate the rooster who helped to produce all those eggs…
easterrooster2
Chocolate is now firmly entrenched into the French customs surrounding the celebration of Easter…reportedly at least 20% of the nation’s annual sales of chocolate occurs during this time. (And that’s no small amount since 97% of the French eat chocolate at least once a week).
And of course, it’s Easter chocolate as only the French can conceive…here are some examples for your holiday enjoyment…
…as seen in the windows of Lenôtre……a bunny wearing a toque de cuisinier…OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA …waving gaily as he flies in a chocolate balloon over a chocolate Paris…
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA …priced at 390 euros, one would have to be a very, very good little girl or boy to find one of these creations!
Over at the next window, one finds his friend, the rooster…OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA…who is much smaller, and not quite so expensive…but the chocolate map is much smaller as well and the Eiffel Tower that he flies over is not in chocolate as it is for the flying bunny. A very strong incentive to be really, really good!
Over at Patrick Roger’s…OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA …there’s a chicken with chocolate “feathers” and a white chocolate “nest” and the shells of real eggs that have been filled with chocolate.
Last year, Monsieur Roger created an amazing chocolate “vegetable patch”…OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
…with cheerful Easter potatoes…
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…rows of smiling carrots…OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
…and several marauding hedge hogs making quick work of shelling some chocolate-filled eggs…OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA …and of course, except for the egg shells…every bit of the scene…including the farm house…was in chocolate!
And to think that I used to marvel at a Cadbury egg…Joyeuses Pâques!
Stay tuned for more behind the scenes adventures of The Meadows Collection…or check out the results at www.meadowscollection.com

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

The View From My Window…Dimanche des Rameaux

Well, I’m still wrestling with computer issues. For now, I think the computer itself is functioning, but the keyboard has suddenly decided to go haywire….and at the moment, there is absolutely no correlation between which key is pressed and what symbol appears!
So less words…more pictures.
Early in the morning…à table in our fourth-floor, walk-up pied à terre…this was the view from my window last Sunday…
procession1It’s not terribly unusual for us to hear music from la rue down below…strains of Piaf from an accordion player on the corner…or an impromptu jazz trio on the bridge that connects us to “the other island”…but this time, there was a definite difference in what we heard.


What the…?  Ah, yes…it was Palm Sunday. Only here it’s called  Dimanche des Rameaux…Branch Sunday…and while there was one palm leaf…

procession2 …held aloft by the prêtre…be-splendid in an embroidered crimson velvet cloak…

…the other participants are holding branches of buis or boxwood…
procession4The parishioners follow…
procession3  …forming a procession of faithful…that sings its way toward our neighborhood church. We can smell the mixture of incense, candles, and foliage. With each participant carrying a branch, from our vantage point, it’s sort of like a horizontal bush chanting its way up the street.
procession5
Different types of branches are used in different parts of France. Here, it’s boxwood, but other regions might use laurel branches…in Provence, an olive branch is carried as a symbol of peace and abundance. It’s all part of a custom that dates back to the ninth century.  Once the procession reaches its destination and is inside the church, the branches are ceremoniously blessed to signify vitality. Some are then placed on the graves of the departed and others are kept at home…until the following year, when they are brought back to the church to be burned as part of the ceremonies for Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent.
Where does one find all that boxwood?

Buxus sempervirens is its botanical name…

processionboxwood     …and throughout Europe it has been used for centuries in various handicrafts…carved into countless chess pieces or…duh…boxes.

Even though we are in the middle of the big city, it was not difficult to find boxwood branches…boxwood is a common component of a traditional French garden and we were lucky enough to befriend the gardeners at the nearby Bibliotèque Forney…an amazing library devoted to the Decorative Arts…
procession8…as well as a wonderful place to sit and admire the architecture of the building in which it is housed…constructed between 1475 and 1507 as the Parisian residence of the Archbishop of Sens.

A French garden often consists of low hedges that form a decorative pattern…
procession6 …and, in keeping with that old saying…one man’s hedge clippings is another man’s symbol of vitality…
procession7Ahhhh…Paris in the Springtime…who needs words, anyway?

Stay tuned for more behind the scenes adventures of The Meadows Collection…or check out the results at www.meadowscollection.com