We Are Family

My dear Reader, in this post you can be sure that the title is meant to be ironic (especially since I say so). Last year I spent the Easter mostly on my own, mostly in pajamas or tracksuit, writing my second thesis (Hungarian cognitive linguistics). My father was away with his wife's family, and my mother with her husband's. You can guess it was fun 24/7. This year I was lucky because first of all I had no thesis to write, secondly, my sister accompanied me in my familyless solitude of Easter. And it turned out to be real fun.
Inspired by Little Women, I decided to become a busy bee for once. Seems that even lazy bums can make an effort at Easter. On Saturday, we went shopping with my sister and washed two doses of clothes. On Sunday we dusted (or to be more exact, un-dusted) all the cupboards in the house. Which entailed that I had to climb up and down a ladder all day. In the evening, my boyfriend came and we made a huge amount of túrós pogácsa. This was our first pogácsa, and it turned out to be a real hit. I asked him to knead the dough as he is much stronger and usually does it for me. The recipe was not complicated, I found it at nosalty. It took about 2 hours and three baking pans to bake it but it was absolutely delicious.
When we were ready with the pogácsa, we laid the table with all the treasures we had, namely ham, eggs, corn salad, radish, pickles, pogácsa, and two kinds of fruit juice. My boyfriend loves ceremonies, so we used our best dishes and napkins, and really enjoyed laying the table. It was just splendid. I even made a sort of shrine for the chocolate bunnies, though it sounds a bit pagan now that I think of it. We started the dinner by presenting each other with chocolate, then we had cream liqueur as aperitif, and the dinner was all ceremonious. After that me and my boyfriend watched Jesus Christ Superstar together, wrapped in blankets on the sofa. This was the first time I saw it as a whole and it was really thought-provoking, so we talked for a long time before falling asleep. I loved this day. It was better than Christmas.

On Easter Monday we have this custom of "watering," when men water the women with all kinds of things from cheap musk-juice to seltzer water. I think the custom is stronger in the country, especially in small villages, where everyone waters everyone, so some women have to change clothes every hour or so. My boyfriend only waters his family and neighbours. Personally I'm not too keen on this custom because we girls get wet and stinky, whereas the boys get a lot of eggs, chocolate, and money; they eat and drink all day, while we wait for them and prepare dishes. In addition, there are too many obscene and not at all funny watering rhymes nowadays. Nevertheless, I think it's important to keep the tradition, especially if not complete strangers but my friends and family water me. And it's also much better than watching TV in pajamas (or tracksuit, if I have the power to dress up.) This year one of the brothers of my boyfriend accompanied him, and I was delighted because I consider it as a gesture of welcoming me to the family (after three years of going out together). The other remarkable gesture happened on the part of my future father-in-law, namely that he allowed me to eat from his precious ham roll (filled with horse radish) and salad.
As an appropriate finale to the holiday today we went out to the nearby forest, called Kamaraerdő and played cards in the open air. (Then I played two hours with my favourite computer game, shame on me.)
Hope next Easter will be just as much fun, though probably with fewer chores.