Welcome Spring!!

On Tuesday evening, at about 7:00 we ushered in Spring here in the midwest. Our preparations for the Ostara (Spring Equinox) celebration began on Saturday with coloring eggs. Look at those gorgeous dyes - no pre-packaged pellets - just food dye, vinegar and boiling water. The colors were just great on the eggs - soft and new looking - like a water color painting.

Egg dying and decorating is deep-rooted in European pre-Christian cultures as the egg sympbolizes fertility and new life. Women who wanted to become pregnant would often wear a finely decorated egg to help bring about the hope of a new little life. Today, they symbolize the beauty of the season for us and bringing ferility of new ideas, new ventures, new beginnings into our lives at spring time.

And, of course, hunting the eggs is always great fun. Our egg hunt was last night - on our first full day of spring - in Bev and Karen's yard. Their yard and the weather were perfect examples of spring. There were left-over snow piles, all crusty with the melting and refreezing that happens when the days warm, but the nights are still cold. There were mud holes deep enough to swallow a small child from those places where the snow had completely melted and there were barren branches in the trees and bushes, waiting for the new buds. The weather provided lots of spring-time drama with temps in the lower 50's, fog, rain and then a series of good old thunderstorms. We got in the egg hunt between one down-pour and the next thunderstorm.

Of course these eggs were hidden by the infamous Bunny - again this furry magical creature has its roots in pre-Christian and Pagan traditions. The rabbit is understood to be a goddess who has taken on an animal form to bring newness and fertility (think about all of those babies rabbits have!) to the world in the early spring.