here come the easter witches

Saturday is the main day for celebrating Easter in Sweden, though the festive and largely secular spring holiday gets off to a start with an eat-drink-and-be-merry affair on Thursday, in preparation for what used to be a solemn day of fasting on Good Friday. A big family meal takes place on Saturday afternoon. We were invited to join the Strands, our friendly Swedish/American family: Lenart, a Swede on the faculty who has been our main contact at the university, his American wife Jay-Jay, and their two daughters Emma, just turned twelve, and Mimmi, ten.
They told us to come to their house around 2 p.m., when the girls would go out in their “good witch” disguises to knock on their neighbors’ doors, asking for candy in exchange for little home-made Easter cards. The look for these witches is to wear a kerchief and odd colorful old clothes, have freckles painted on their noses and red painted cheeks. The hags traditionally carry a basket, a coffee pot, and are accompanied by a black cat. Here a few birch branches with yellow feathers wired on serve as a sort of symbolic broom. The yellow feathers also remind of chickens and eggs, a big feature at Easter, as hens begin laying eggs in earnest once the days lengthen after the long dark winter. The Easter Bunny doesn’t enter the scene at all.
The Easter Witch custom goes back to the Witches’ Sabbath, when they flew off on brooms—or on pigs--for an orgy with the devil on the night before Easter. There’s a rich folklore associated with this. Obviously it has been much transformed.
Off the girls went, while we adults took a walk out to the nearby woods to look for blåsippor, the early intensely blue wild flower (a hepatica), which had bloomed the previous week. But the weather had turned very cold, almost freezing with a stiff wind, and the blåsippor had closed up.
The girls returned with baskets full of various candies and even some cash. Mimmi laid hers out very methodically, grouping like candies together, the candy-coated almonds here, the foil-wrapped small chocolate eggs there, the licorice fish and bears here, and counting them. Emma collapsed in a beanbag chair and went back to reading her new Nancy Drew mystery, idly popping the odd piece of candy in her mouth.
The adults enjoyed aperitifs of vanilla rum, a Delicato chardonnay from California, and an Alsatian risling. Jay-Jay, an accomplished cook whose recipes are regularly published in a Swedish magazine, had broiled an enormous Norwegian salmon and garnished it with small shrimp, dill, lemon, and lime, and we contributed an American potato salad. The witches had made cream puffs, filled with real whipped cream and strawberries they’d picked last summer, drizzled with dark chocolate.
Just before dark, JM and I walked back to our apartment, about 20 minutes along the river. Besides the appeal of some exercise after all the eating and drinking, walking home means that everyone can enjoy the wine, guests and hosts alike, as Swedes are very scrupulous about not drinking and driving.
As Sweden is a very secular country, most people spend Sunday relaxing with their families and Monday is also a holiday.
Glad Påsk!