During Easter celebrations, Lithuanians don’t use the images of cute and fuzzy bunnies hiding their eggs all around. Instead, they have the Easter Granny.
This endearing old lady known as Velyku Bobute is the one that brings the Easter eggs to the children, although it is true that she has some bunnies that act as her assistants and help to decorate the eggs and load her cart before she goes to deliver them.
Easter is a very important time for families in Lithuania, where everybody gets together to share large amounts of delicious food and decorate Easter eggs with natural dies such as boiled red onion skins, which are then scratched to make a design in white.
Easter Granny (Velykų Senelė) delivers Easter eggs and treats to children. Children often prepare for the Easter Granny by leaving empty homemade egg nests outside their homes in gardens and shrubs.
On Easter morning, they wake to search for their hidden margučiai treasures. Bunnies who painted Easter eggs
were also a familiar fixture, but they were only helpers for the Velykų Senelė.
Very early Easter morning they load Easter eggs into a beautiful little cart pulled by a tiny swift horse. The Velykų Senelė used a sunbeam as a whip.
Sometimes the bunnies themselves pulled the cart laden with Easter eggs. The Easter Granny travels around the country, stopping in every child’s yard to leave eggs in baskets place
d or hung for that purpose.
When they awake, good children find beautifully decorated Easter eggs (and in. more recent times even sweets). Bad children only find a single plain completely white egg.
If this happens, the child is disgraced.
His friends and family laugh at him. Sometimes bunnies accompany the Granny and help her distribute the Easter eggs.
They are kept busy not only before Easter and on Easter day, but all year round baking cookies for children. When parents leave their children behind, they promise to bring them a gift, bunny cookies.
The Lithuanian Easter buffet is a lavish contrast to the meatless Lenten fast. Opulent displays of roasted pork, baked ham, lamb, veal, sausages, roasted duck, and roasted chicken abound. If lamb is not served, then butter or ch
eese is molded into the shape of a lamb and served to symbolize Easter.
Accompaniments include homemade cheeses, hard-boiled eggs, sautéed or creamed mushrooms, kugelis, rye bread, assorted salads, and horseradish. Wine flows and an equally impressive dessert selection of poppy seed rolls, nut rolls,
honey cakes, and raisin and/or dried fruit “boba” pieces of bread follow the meal.
For Lithuanian Christians, Easter (Velykos) is the most sacred of holidays. It follows 40 somber days of Lenten moderation and marks the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Each spring, Lithuanians commemorate the Passion of Christ by attending church services throughout Holy Week on Palm Sunday, Holy Wednesday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday.
While the rites of thes
e services are comparable to those in other parts of the world, many Easter traditions observed outside of church liturgy are uniquely Lithuanian.
