Onion Skin Red Egg Dye

 I just realized the blog where I originally got my onion skin dye instructions is no more! Fortunately, I saved the instructions and will share them here for posterity with thanks to the Williams Family. 

Yellow Onion Skins Method 

Originally from: http://williamsfamilyadventure.blogspot.com/2011/04/blood-red-easter-eggs.html My additions in brackets.

Gather lots of yellow onion skins. [I actually keep a grocery sack in my pantry and collect them all year. Leave the sack open so they dry out and don't get moldy. If you don't have enough, buy a sack of onions and take all the skins off! That should be enough.] 

During Holy Week, a few days before Pascha [on Holy Thursday between morning Liturgy and evening Passion Gospels], stuff them into a pot and pour about 1.5 liters (or quarts - they are the same, pretty much) of water over them, plus one tablespoon of vinegar per cup of water. That is 4 tablespoons (or 1/4 cup) for a liter. I use white or pale vinegar. [Don't overdo the vinegar! It will break down the egg shell and make them look bad.]

It is important for all the onion skins to be submerged, but, at the same time, you don't want to dilute the dye by using too much water. So squish down the onion skins with a weighted plate. Bring this to a boil and then simmer for about a half hour. If, say, I had less than the desired about of onion skins, I might keep on simmering for longer, to extract as much color as possible from the skins. But, like I said, I usually have more than enough onion skins, so a half hour is enough to produce a deeply colored dye.

Cook the eggs at the same time as dying them. [I think you can take the skins out now, but I also think I've done it both ways.] If you want, you can hard-boil the eggs first, and then dye them (I don't know how much longer the dyeing would take without the heat, but probably not a significant amount of time). Certainly, that would be the way to go if you draw or write on them with wax before the dying process (to leave an imprint in the dye). Otherwise, the wax would melt off into the dye. 

My concluding remarks:

I usually make 40-50 eggs for our little parish, and the concern is to dye them without cracking. You can't pile them up or let the water boil too rapidly without risking cracking. I usually boil a single layer (12 or so) in the low-boiling dye for 8-10 minutes, repeating until I have enough.

One year I had a full gallon size bag of onion skins and doubled the recipe to make a very full pot. I don't think this is necessary since I don't like to layer the eggs while dying/cooking. Fewer skins will still go a long way. 

Someone told me to polish them with olive oil to make them pretty and shiny, and I like to do that. 

I keep them in a basket in the fridge until Holy Saturday morning, when I take them to the church and leave them in the fridge for the evening service. This natural dye won't bleed, if if they sweat in the fridge. Toward the end of the Liturgy I step out to get them and put them by the solea or take to an altar boy.

 

New Pascha Basket Cover Design and Printable Cards

This is pretty similar to my old one, but I freshened up the flowers and added Serbian. I've uploaded the design to spoonflower if anyone else wants to make a cover. There are two options - the first version is embedded below is for a single cover printed on a fat quarter. Or, if you'd like to make a bunch as gifts, use this one to get 4 printed on a yard with the basic repeat.

And here's the design for regular printing to make cards at home. We like to print the 4 to a page on cardstock, and the kids give them to their friends on Pascha.

A Few More Egg Printables

Just a few more quick printables. I wrote a little poem about red eggs last year, and put in on a few new cards. They're pretty plain, but I think they teach what the red egg-dyeing is all about. I also made a coloring page so kids can decorate 12 eggs, too. Remember you can check out all my printables and pascha cards with these tags. 

Dozen egg coloring page with Red Egg Poem 

Red Egg Poem printable postcards

Christ is Risen! (New Egg and T-shirt Designs)

We're starting the 5th week of Lent, and I'm wearily looking forward to Pascha. I made some new printable cards for the kids to give or mail to friends for Pascha (check out all my Pascha cards). I also uploaded these new simps edesigns to Zazzle just for fun. Last year, I ordered myself a t-shirt with one of my red-egg designs, and I think I may get a new one this year. I was having fun playing with the designs and dazzle and made a ton of options. Printables and links below!

Greeting card-style Pascha cards: print at 100% on card stock,
cut apart along black line, and fold on gray line. Write notes on the inside.

Christ is Risen, Red Egg T-shirt
by orthojack

Christ is Risen, Red Egg Baby Shirt
by orthojack

Christ is Risen, Red Egg Tote
by orthojack

Red Egg Poem printable

I decided to play around with a new red egg design this year, and I made a little poem to go with it. It fits a full size page, but feel free to scale it down for cards, etc. We're almost there!

I'm not much of a poet, but this is my Red Egg Poem:

In Holy Week, we remember
the blood Christ shed,
and so we dye our eggs
a deep dark red.
The hard egg shell reminds us
of the sealed tomb of stone,
where they laid Christ body
while he went to Hades alone.
But there he took death captive
and broke the gates of Hell,
and so we shout, "Christ is risen!"
And crack our red egg shell.

Celebrating Christ on Easter (with baskets!)

You guys, I love Easter.

Easter, or Pascha, along with Lent and Holy Week, has become my favorite time of year. These days of intense preparation are beautiful and difficult and call me back to a place of deep joy.

So each year around this time, when I see people lamenting bunnies and pastel eggs, and dismissing the whole thing as pagan, I want to remind them of the beautiful Christian origins of this feast. This is the Feast of feasts! Early Christians didn't keep this feast because they secretly didn't want to give up their pagan traditions - they had the greatest reason of all to celebrate. We, too, have every reason to celebrate this day with joy - even with eggs and baskets!

So, to encourage you to embrace this season, I've put together a brief list of Easter facts and symbols explaining their origins (with sources). I'm not a historian, so I'm relying heavily on wikipedia, and in this case, I'm grateful for the communal knowledge it offers on the subject. I'm also including some pictures from my family's celebration of Pascha in recent years. Here we go!

1. "Easter" or "Pascha"

Icon of Christ on the cross at St. Nicholas
Orthodox Church in Jackson, TN, 2015

The word "Easter" derives from the old Germanic word for the month Easter usually fell in: Ēosturmōnaþ (our month of April). The month was named for the goddess Eostre, a germanic divinity, in the same way that many of our months are named for Roman gods. This connection to the goddess is dependent solely on a statement by Bede in the 8th century. But the celebration of Easter undoubtedly preceded the term. (Wikipedia: Easter Etymology)

Early Christians actually called the feast by the greek name for Passover, since the resurrection happened during the Passover weekend and the earliest Christians were Jews. Πάσχα or Pascha is the greek word. (Wikipedia: Easter Etymology) The words can be used interchangeably. In the US, the name "Pascha" is still used by Orthodox churches.

In 1 Corinthians, Paul calls Christ the passover, or Pascha, "For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth." Christ fulfills the old feast, and is himself the new feast!

2. Beginnings

Easter began as Jewish Christians continued to celebrate Passover with the new Christian implications. A fully formed Christian celebration of Pascha is evidenced by the mid-2nd century by the Paschal homily of Melitos of Sardis. (Wikipedia: Easter in the Early Church, and the Homily)

3. Lent 

printable calendar for Orthodox Lent

The term "lent" is derived from an old English term meaning spring. In Greek speaking countries it is called Μεγάλη Τεσσαρακοστή, which means "Great 40 days," but still called "Great Lent" in English. (Wikipedia: Great Lent)

In the early church, new Christians prepared for their baptism with a period of fasting and prayer. This gradually developed into a 40 day fasting period, and was connected to Easter, and was eventually adopted by the whole community in communion with the new Christians' baptism. The liturgical celebration of Lent and Holy Week vary in the East and West, especially in duration/structure, and among Orthodox Christians customs vary in different regions, but they all originated as a time of repentance and preparation for baptism. For Catholics, Ash Wednesday is 45 days before Easter, or 40 days if you don't count the Sundays. For Orthodox, Lent starts on Clean Monday, 48 days before Pascha, or 40 days plus Holy Week.  (Wikipedia: Lent)

Holy Week is an intense week of services, walking us through the final days of Christ's life. My favorite part begins when we read 12 gospel passages about the passion on Thursday night and during the service nail an icon of Christ on a cross. On Friday morning, the children decorate the funeral bier with flowers. Then, we have a shorter service remembering Christ being taken down from the cross, during which the icon is taken down and wrapped in a sheet and laid on the funeral bier. That night we carry the funeral bier in a procession around the church, and re-enter the church by going under the bier (symbolizing our union with Christ in death). Holy Friday services are powerful and beautiful!

On Saturday night, around midnight, the church is dark. Slowly, chanting a beautiful invitation to receive Christ's light, the priest brings one candle from the altar, and everyone lights their candle until the church is full of light. Soon, we shout and sing Christ is risen in many languages. The fast is over and the celebration has begun. After the Liturgy, we have a big feast in the middle of the night, eating all the foods we've been fasting from. I love that all of our serious hard work ends with full-hearted fun.

4. The date

Churches in the East and the West use the same ancient formula to calculate the date of Easter, but the East uses the old Julian Calendar as opposed to the new Gregorian calendar. So Eastern churches celebrate Pascha sometimes several weeks after Western Eastern, although occasionally they still fall on the same date. You can read the specifics of the calculations at the link. (Wikipedia: Easter computations) In 2016, Easter and Pascha are 5 weeks apart! So if you miss out on Western Easter, you still have time to join in on Eastern Pascha. ;) In 2017, we'll celebrate together!

5. Easter Baskets 

Easter baskets at the front of the church at
St. Nicholas Orthodox Church

Early Christians fasted prior to Easter by giving up meat, eggs, and dairy (as well as wine and oil). So when Pascha arrived, they brought baskets of these rich foods to the church to be blessed. After the Paschal Liturgy they feasted on these foods in the spirit of the joy of the resurrection. (Wikipedia: Easter Egg Lenten Tradition)

 Eastern Orthodox Christians still keep this tradition, with varying customs. In our church, we bring our baskets, laden with food and decorated with flowers and fancy cloth covers (like mine shown at the top), into the front of the nave of the church during the Liturgy. At the very end of the service, the priest blesses the eggs and "flesh meats" - and then we take the baskets to the hall to enjoy our feast together. Besides food for the church feast, many families include foods that they will take home and enjoy throughout the rest of Bright week as they continue to celebrate at home. In our basket, we included butter, eggs, chocolate for the kids, summer sausages and fancy cheeses.

Our Pascha Basket, 2016

6. Easter Eggs 

Printable Red Egg Pascha Cards

Eggs are certainly a sign of new life and spring, and this fits thoroughly with the themes of Passover and Easter. While pastel and chocolate eggs are modern traditions, the egg itself has long been associated with Christian Easter. The egg reminds us of a stone, but, like Christ's tomb, it breaks open to reveal new life. (Wikipedia: Easter Egg)

Orthodox Christians traditionally dye their eggs not in pastels, but deep red for the blood of Christ, which yields this new life. The tradition of red eggs comes from legends about Mary Magdalene, my patron saint. (Wikipedia: Easter Eggs Legends) The one I'm most familiar with tells how Mary shared the gospel with the Roman Emperor. When appearing before the emperor, one usually brought a gift, and Mary, having given away all of her possessions to the poor, brought a humble egg. The emperor was offended by her simple gift, and when she told him that Christ was risen from the dead, he rudely replied, "He is no more risen than that egg is red!" And immediately the egg turned red in her hand. (From a Children's Paradise of Saints)

I can appreciate another reason eggs may have become abundant at Easter celebrations. Christians fasted from eggs during the springtime, when hens suddenly begin laying lots of eggs! So by the time Easter arrived, they needed to eat all the eggs so they wouldn't go to waste. We have a dozen or so chickens at our house, so I try to dye a bunch of red eggs to share each year!

my red eggs, ready to go to church!

7. The Easter Bunny

A beeswax egg candle, cadbury eggs, homemade donuts for breakfast;
 bunny (!) legos and new bibles were in the kids' Pascha baskets last year.

Orthodox Christians don't have any bunnies in their traditions, although I might still eat a chocolate one! Wikipedia suggests the easter bunny was developed later by German Lutherans to reward good children much like Santa Claus. So, although this is one of the customs people are quick to call pagan, it seems to be just a fun, folk tradition with springtime symbols. (Wikipedia: Easter Bunny Association with Eostre) We don't play Easter bunny in our family, but we still enjoy treating the kids with baskets of their own on the following morning, with chocolates, books, and toys. Here's our Pascha breakfast table, late on Pascha Sunday last year (after we came home and slept off our late night Liturgy and feast).

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So there you go. Whatever customs you don't like, the thoroughly Christian traditions are rich enough that you can easily do without bunnies and pastels and still celebrate this feast with joy.

This video shows the end of the procession at the Paschal vigil last year. We've just filled the dark church with light and we begin to shout, "Christ is risen!" in many languages. Last year, I had a 1 week old newborn, but I didn't want to completely miss our mission church's first Paschal celebration, so baby and I sat in the narthex to watch, and that's where I took this video. Towards the end, you can see our baskets at the front of the church and children sleeping in the chairs - this is the joy at the end of the journey.

End of the procession during Paschal Matins. Christ is risen!

Posted by St. Nicholas Orthodox Church on Sunday, April 12, 2015

I've mostly discussed the light-hearted customs of baskets and eggs, but they are only a small part of this rich feast. The celebration of Pascha reveals the mystery of the Christian faith in the resurrection, the eighth day. More than just remembering the resurrection, we immerse ourselves in it "to experience the new creation of the world, a taste of the new and unending day of the Kingdom of God." (Orthodoxwiki: Great and Holy Pascha) So don't miss out on this Feast of feasts on account of bunnies or pagans. Instead, let's celebrate it with prayer, struggle and beauty, with fun and food, singing and shouting "Christ is risen!" because, truly, He is risen. 

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More Reading:

- GOARCH: Great and Hoy Pascha

- Charlotte Riggle: Pascha Baskets, Pascha Eggs

- Rita Wilson: This is how we do it: Greek Easter: 

- No, its not all about Ishtar.

- The Modern Myth of the Easter Bunny

- On the Bunny Trail: In Search of the Easter Bunny

- Bobby Valentine: Easter/Pascha: What They Did not Tell Me about Easter in the Early Church

Pascha Basket

I didn't finish my basket cover in time for Pascha. In fact, my spoonflower package arrived on Bright Monday! But on Wednesday, I took red eggs to the skete, so I decided to hem up the cloth and take it then.

I printed it on a fat quarter of cotton voile, although tea towels are usually printed on their linen-cotton canvas. I thought the cotton voile felt more like a handkerchief, and being a bit fancier, I'd be more likely to not use it for dish washing and save it for Pascha. I'm very pleased with how it turned out! If you don't mind hemming your own, you can order a fat quarter on Spoonflower, too.

Red Eggs

I had a really wonderful time dyeing red eggs this year. Mine didn't turn out well last year, so, to be sure I had enough, I had been saving yellow onion skins pretty much since last year! I used the instructions here. She gives so many good tips, and it turned out perfectly. 

I made a lot this year to take to the skete and to our mission feast, and since I was afraid the onion skins wouldn't work, I also bought the Anatoli Greek red dye from AFP. I ended up making a batch of each, which was a fun comparison. 

our chicken's eggs of many sizes and colors!

the red dye from the yellow onion skins

leftover onion skins and the Anatoli dye 

Finished eggs! 

The Anatoli dye made a deep true red, while the yellow onion skins made a deep brownish red. Both were very nice, and neither bled onto my hands much at all (even after being kept in the fridge). I don't think he onion skins bled at all, and the Anatoli dye only did after several days, and even then not very much. I polished all with olive oil, and they were so lovely. 

Pascha Basket Cover design

I've been enjoying this egg design so much, I decided I want to print one as a Pascha basket cover. St. Mary Magdalene is my patron saint, and so I especially enjoy red eggs. :) I didn't get it done in time for this year, unfortunately, but this is the design I'll be printing. 

There was a typo in the card shared in the  previous post - surprisingly in the English, not one of the other languages! It's been corrected now. Certainly glad to see it before I printed the basket cover!

This is the design on Spoonflower (where I'm printing it). I originally mean to print it on linen-cotton canvas, which is nice for tea towels, but since this will be more decorative I put it on a nice cotton voile instead, to make it more like a large handkerchief. Click on the image below to see it on spoonflower where you can order your own print (or design your own!). I just love spoonflower. I will probably lay it over my basket before I decide how wide to hem it.

I also turned this design into a printable for cards, too, because why not? Below both printables are meant for letter size paper, one can be cut into six postcard style cards, or use the second image to scale down into a normal card, or whatever you like. 

(and the finished basket cover!)

2014 Printable Pascha Cards: Christ is Risen!

I made a new red egg Pascha card this year (see last year's card). It has "Christ is risen! Indeed he is risen!" in 4 languages: Greek, Arabic, English, and Russian. I used those 4 languages because they are the languages represented at our mission - but wouldn't it be fun to make one in many more languages?

I put together a few printable versions of it. I love, love the black and red one, but the white one uses less ink. The first two images are 8.5x11", so you may want to scale them to a half page to make a folded card. I also assembled one 8.5 x11 page with 6 cards - I'll probably print a few of those on card stock, cut them out, and let the kids write on the back. That way we can have lots to give out to friends. If they take a moment to load, its because they are large files. Click on the image, and drag it to your desktop to save (...or however you windows-users do it).

May you have a good remainder of the fast!

UPDATE: EEk! Typo corrected. And find a colorful flowery version here

Christ is Risen!

The top image fills a full page, 

and the bottom can be printed and folded into a Pascha card.
Read more about St. Mary Magdalene and the tradition of the red eggs here. 

UPDATE: find my 2014 printable Pascha egg card here, and here,
my 2016 Red Egg Poem Printable,
and my 2017 Printable Sunshine and Egg cards.