Osterbaum

Well, that was a quick turn-around - even for me. I went from "what the heck is an Easter Egg Tree, and why would anyone make one?" to "I'm going to make an Easter Tree!" in less than 24 hours.

Okay, not quite. I had borrowed a book on "Easter Treats" from my local library about a week and a bit ago, thinking it would contain things like recipes for marshmallow bunnies. Every now and then I like to pretend I'm likely to make something like marshmallow. I've never made marshmallow in my life (there may have been a 'cooking' project in primary school that involved making marshmallow, but I can't remember), but I do like to believe that one day I might.

Anyway, the book didn't have marshmallow rabbit recipes (or even Easter egg recipes, which I thought was a bit odd), but it did have some stuff about making decorative egg whatsits out of blown eggs. One of the decorative egg whatsits was something called an "Easter egg tree".

Now, I had never heard of an Easter egg tree before, and the picture in the book made it seem like something those bizarre home decorators on TV do to make themselves look creative and artsy (I can't watch those shows seriously after watching Life Support - it was barely possible before hand). So, I dismissed the entire concept of said EET as being pretentious and pointless.

And then I happened to catch a show that was never meant to be on TV (at least, it wasn't advertised in any of the TV guides, and when you hit the "info" button on the remote control the programme was identified as "unknown"). It was all about a group of German immigrants (and their children and grandchildren) who have been camping at the same spot every Easter since 1969. It was oddly fascinating, watching these people talk about the traditions that had built up over the last thirty years. And, on Easter Sunday, they decorated their tables with Easter Trees - which they had made on the camp site from carefully selected branches, eggs they had decorated the Saturday and whatever other shiny things they happened to have lying around.

My first thought: "Hunh, those Easter Tree thingies are actually real things that normal people make". This was quickly succeeded by several other thoughts which eventually cumulated in "I'm going to make an Easter Tree!"

Truth be told, I'd been thinking of decorating for Easter. It's always irked me that my family doesn't put any effort into Easter at all. It's always a bit of a struggle getting them to do things for Christmas (if my mother had her way, the tree would go up on the 24th and down again on the 26th), and Easter is practically a non-event. This year I just wanted to do something - paint an egg, make a marshmallow bunny, roll something down a hill (I can never remember if it's supposed to be boiled eggs or cheese)...

Well, this year I made a quick-n-dirty Easter Tree. I tried to die the eggs, which didn't turn out quite as well as I had intended. It seems that brown eggs don't take food dye as well as white eggs, but I can't remember the last time I saw a white egg in the shops. I swear must still exist, but I haven't seen one for years. I also only had four eggs as I didn't want to waste any more than that in case it all went horribly wrong.

So this year's Easter Tree wasn't the greatest Easter Tree in the history of Easter Trees. Next year will hopefully see a bit of an improvement.





Oh, and just to prove that Easter Trees (or Osterbaum) are something real people actually make (in case you, like me, were raised in a cultural vacuum) take a look at these.

I have, of course, gone with an autumnal theme for my Easter Tree, as in this hemisphere Easter occurs in Autumn. I am nothing if not seasonally appropriate.