Yesterday was Orthodox Easter,1 which means something to me because I grew up in an Orthodox Christian country. My family is not particularly religious, so we took part in Easter celebrations in the way most non-religious people do: yes please to the food, music, and festivities, no thank you to the church services.
There’s no Easter bunny hiding chocolate eggs in the garden on Orthodox Easter. Instead, we eat kulich, a sweet bread which is sort of similar to Italian panettone, and a sweet creamy spread called paskha. Most years my mom would bake many kulichi herself, which my sister and I then enthusiastically decorated with icing and sprinkles. We also painted chicken eggs all colors of the rainbow, or covered them with Easter-themed stickers. All our culinary creations would then get taken to a nearby church for a traditional blessing before getting shared with friends and family (who often reciprocated with similar gifts), and enjoyed on Easter day.
When I moved to the US and started spending Easter away from home, we got more creative with the celebrations. Home-made kulich was replaced with Italian panettone, ordered as a surprise for me by my parents. Ironically, Italians eat panettone for Christmas, but still - close enough! Instead of an Easter brunch, I’d get ice cream with fellow Eastern European students, all of us too busy with coursework and too lacking in culinary talents to make our traditional foods, but wanting to do at least a little something to celebrate the occasion nonetheless.
This year, it felt like Easter snuck up on me all of a sudden. I hadn’t made any special plans, and still don’t have a community of Eastern Europeans where I’m currently living to organize an ice cream outing with.
So I ended up not doing anything special, besides sending a few celebratory Facebook messages to family friends. Technically, there’s nothing wrong with that since I’m not a church-going Orthodox Christian. Yet I still felt a deep twang of nostalgia when I scrolled through photos of people getting ready for Easter services, children decorating eggs, and tables full of kulich and paskha on social media. Though it was always somewhat distanced from its religious roots for me, Easter felt like a special day when I could celebrate my community and culture with my family.
Before this gets too woe-is-me, I should say I had a really nice Sunday regardless, planning summer trips with my boyfriend and catching up with friends over wine and popcorn in the evening. But it also made me reflect on how fluid traditions, culture, and celebrations can be. Think of the biggest celebrations in your calendar - be it Thanksgiving or Eid or Diwali or Christmas. They seem like such a natural part of the year that it’s almost impossible to imagine a world where they’re not celebrated. Yet they are not natural in the same way that seasons or atoms are. They’re not inherent to the world, but rather are created, celebrated within a specific culture, and made possible through a ton of active effort. And most importantly: brought alive and maintained by a whole community of people who are invested in the occasion.
Move cities, and your traditions might lose the quirky little parts that only your family or home community do. Move countries, and it gets that much harder to keep the traditions up altogether, when there are fewer people around you who celebrate the same occasions that you do. And here’s where the fluidity comes in, because now you really have to make an active effort to maintain the customs that felt like second nature back home.
The first step of that effort comes with a deliberate pause. The physical distance brings with it some critical space to evaluate which of your customs are actually important to you, and which are less so. Does it feel meaningful to celebrate Easter, if it can’t be with your family and friends back home? There’s no right or wrong answer - some people seek out new communities who share their culture, while others choose to distance themselves from home and adopt new patterns of life instead. A truly beautiful part of it all, in my opinion, is figuring out how to adapt the meaningful parts to your new surroundings, like getting ice cream instead of kulich because it’s just that much easier, but still makes you feel closer to home. Another beautiful part is inviting friends from other cultures to celebrate with you, and learning about and taking part in their celebrations in turn.
I got inspired to think about all this because of Orthodox Easter, but I think there’s a much broader point to be made about how we develop and cultivate rituals of our own, particularly as we start directing our lives a bit more independently in our twenties. I’m not just talking about the big religious, national, or cultural celebrations here either. We all grow up doing things a certain way and just sort of taking it for granted because that’s the only way we’ve seen things done at home. An episode of a TV show before bed, a family walk on the weekend, cleaning the house together while blasting music each month, whatever it may be. But as you grow up and move out and go to university and start a new job, you slowly see that these rituals are all constructed - it doesn’t have to be like that at all. It’s up to you to figure out what’s important and what you want to keep doing.
Absolutely all of my favorite rituals that I’ve created in my twenties lack the cultural gravitas of something like Easter Day, but that doesn’t make them less meaningful, in my opinion. It’s weekly Skype calls with my grandma (yep, you read that right - my 80-year-old grandma has absolutely mastered Skype over the past few years. None of that “uhm, I think you’re on mute” or pesky cat filter nonsense here). It’s evenings watching Riverdale over Zoom with a close college friend, the only other person I know who actually enjoys a show that absurd. It’s walks with my sister and trying a new cronut flavor every month with my boyfriend and long runs on the weekend all by myself. Wonderful and wholly artificial rituals, sustained by the energy and time of people who choose to keep them up because we find them meaningful.
The longer we keep our new traditions up, the more they start to blend in with the world and feel as natural as the weather. Going to the gym starts to feel as non-negotiable to your day as brushing your teeth, annual friend get-togethers start to feel more monumental than Christmas. Bit by bit, we create our own traditions and celebrations. Bit by bit, we build our life.
Orthodox Easter usually falls later than Easter elsewhere because Orthodox Christian churches follow a different calendar - Julian rather than Gregorian - to define Easter Day
I love learning about other people's traditions and taking part, and creating my own! A lovely piece Sofia and that kulich looks delicious! ... I love a donut/cronut too!