Living across worlds and blending cultures: Our family’s tale of two Easters

Being a migrant in Australia is good for many reasons.

One is that you get to choose which state you want to call home and another, that you get to celebrate two Easters -the Catholic and the Greek Orthodox- or not celebrate at all and just enjoy the public holidays.

But to get there you have to find your identity in the place you chose to call your home and it’s not always as easy as some people think.

Growing up in Greece, in a traditional family, Easter activities would start a week before Easter. During the Holy Week (Megali Evdomada) my maternal grandmother (Yiayia) would take my siblings and me to our local church while my parents were working.

There was no escape from Yiayia’s obsession with the traditions tied to Easter and no respite -even though we were on school holidays.

For the first eighteen years of my life, on Holy Monday we would start fasting and grandpa would whitewash the house. Tuesday was for cleaning; Wednesday for making Easter cookies, Thursday for dying the eggs red (other colours would not be acceptable) and decorating the Epitaph. By Friday I would look forward to experiencing Saturday midnight’s mysticism and Sunday’s feast with the extended family.

When I met my husband, Chris, I was introduced to Easter egg hunts and his family’s German Easter traditions. We started celebrating both the Catholic and Orthodox Easter.

Who said lamb on the spit doesn’t go well with Weissbier (wheat beer) and pretzel?

Celebrating two Easters in Australia

When I started traveling and the Greek Easter was close, I would pretend it’s just another day. Yiayia was too far away to remind me the traditions and so was my mum who was following what Yiayia had taught her before me.

I needed to escape from what I knew, to rediscover myself and create my own rituals.

In my travels through South East Asia and around Australia, the Greek traditions passed on to me by previous generations became anchors and conversation starters with people from different cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds.

It’s not nice celebrating holidays away from loved ones but there is nothing more rewarding than sharing homemade Greek Easter cookies with your Aussie neighbour and tips on how to master the art of ‘tsougrisma’ (egg cracking tradition).

It’s great to have some culture to share with people you meet in your life journey.

This morning, our children as first-generation Australians, were excited to find out that the Easter had visited our house and they look forward to making Greek cookies and dying eggs red, next week.

In our home we don’t have to choose between Aussie and Greek Easter.

We love how we can blend our cultures and exist in a world that different traditions are embraced and there is room for more to be created along the way. Plus, it’s alright for the Easter Bunny to still be around when the lamb is on the spit and we crack the eggs enjoying a Weissbier!