When you hail from the birthplace of the Olympics, there is only one way to kick off Easter Sunday — with a competition!
In the Greek Orthodox faith, Christmas doesn’t hold a candle to Easter in terms of passion, popularity, and physical toll. It is a marathon of functions you sign up for Friday through Sunday that has you crossing the finish line a few pounds heavier and light on sleep. Xenoi, or non-Greeks, like me, need a few Easter weekends under their belt before developing the requisite endurance. Until then, there are plenty of uplifting moments to help you power through.
The culmination of the holiday occurs just after midnight into Sunday, when Christ is proclaimed risen again amidst a rolling wave of lit candles fanning out from inside the church to the church steps and onto the street like a rippling shockwave of twinkling Lite-Brites. The celebration begins soon thereafter back at the house, at the kitchen table; for many, the first proper meal after a week’s fasting.
The first items on the menu are the dyed hard-boiled Easter eggs, the basket a billowing canopy of solid red sometimes dotted with stencilled puffs of blue and auburn.
Let the games begin!
Egg knocking is practiced in many parts of the world. Some places even host official competitions. The Brits wrote the rulebook on the game. The Greeks, who customarily enjoy a more casual relationship with rules, are arguably its better known ambassadors.
There are myriad variations to tsougrisma, the name the game goes by in Greece. The way we play it, everyone picks an egg. Then we pair off taking turns knocking our egg against our opponent’s to crack it. Both players start with the same end, pointed versus pointed or blunt v. blunt. Two cracked ends and you’re eliminated. The winner advances to the next round, and so on, until there is but one egg standing.
My father-in-law was an astute knocker, meaning he never went into an egg fight without first conducting a little recon. He’d test the eggs by tapping them to ferret out the hardest one, waggishly oblivious to our accusations of tampering. As it turns out, there is no rule against egg tapping.
The higher the pitch, the stronger the shell, whereas a duller sound is your cue to bench the egg and reach for a contending one. Anything in the lower registers intimates an air pocket between the egg and its shell. I did a little digging and learned that egg farmers grade the durability of their shells by practicing something similar they call “belling.” Who knew? My father-in-law, clearly.
While belling entails tapping two eggs together, my father-in-law’s hallmark technique involved lightly rapping the pointed end of an egg against his front teeth while cupping his other hand over his ear. The gambit often bore him out, but it was never about sussing out a win as much as provoking a good-natured rise out of the family, especially the grandkids. We all knew it was coming and grew to cherish it as the traditional curtain-raiser to the Easter celebration.
Never bring chickens to an egg fight, lest they mute the sounds of Easter you don’t know how much you’ll miss until they’re gone.