In our house everyone is looking forward to Easter. With every holiday there are special traditions that families like to carry on. Some families do decorations, some have special music, lots of families make food that is just for that holiday. In our house an Easter tradition that lives on is making Ukrainian Easter Eggs. Pysanky (pih – sen – KEH). It means Eggs Beautiful.
That they are but not without some serious effort. Of course it takes a little skill and practice to create intricate patterns and designs but there are many pitfalls that can pop up along the way. This is my guide and simple explanation of what you can expect while attempting to create a Beautiful Egg for Easter.
You gotta get the right eggs. Farm eggs in particular. And not brown ones, they have to be white, perfectly shaped, and not random weird bumps or irregularities on the shell. If you’re not a farmer get to know one. The right egg is imparitive. Choose wisely, or your egg will be doomed from the start and you won’t even know it.
Applying the wax. Now if you’ve never made Pysanky you’re probably saying – “Huh?” but that’s how you maintain each colour as you go. The tool you use to apply it (Kistka) must be heated in the flame of a candle, filled with beeswax, then heated again, and then once the wax has liquefied you “write” it onto the egg. Then do it again… and again… and again.
Quite the process right? That liquid wax is key to your creation, it is also one of your greatest risks. The BLOB is one of the most dreaded occurrences. At random your kistka could barf out a large amount of wax destroying your pattern or design.
Holidays are a time for family, however having ANY people around while you are creating your beautiful egg is a massive risk. You see any change whether intentional or accidental is instantly past the point of no return. So if someone sneezes, laughs, shifts in their seat, or jostles your work space in any way you go from making Eggs Beautiful to Eggs Un-beautiful.
As the process continues you repeat all of the above for each colour on the egg. Forgetting to cover a certain section that was intended to be a specific colour can really change the outcome. You must be VIGILANT in double checking your work before moving from one colour to the next.
At the very end of your process when you have finally dipped your egg in the last colour of your design you must then remove the wax. The pioneers of this art were reckless and wild using nothing but an open flame to bring the wax back to a molten state. I can just imagine the raucous nights of vodka, salo sandwiches and loose babushkas… they were crazy.
These days we embrace modern technology and slowly warm the egg in an oven then retrieve it with a rag or some other such device so as to not burn your hands and remove the wax with very gentle strokes. Every moment you must also be calculating the risk of disaster… you are still dealing with an egg after all, one wrong move and all of your hard work, all of your effort, all of your blood, sweat, and tears will be for nothing.
Believe me shattering an Easter egg at the very end is comparable to nothing short of watching your car roll backwards down a steep hill into traffic. You see it happen in slow motion and for a moment or two you try to do everything you can to stop it from happening until you realize it’s gone…
Or everything goes great and you get a Beautiful Easter Egg! Check it out! Here are the eggs we made this year. Mine is the black one with the flowers and Megan’s is the red and white one.
I would have to say that my beautiful wife Megan and I are pretty lucky to still have this tradition alive in our family.
