Sharing Easter Traditions

Happy Easter everyone! Hope you had a relaxing holiday weekend. We wanted to share the Pascua (Easter) traditions that are common here in Panama and a special activity we planned for the kids in our community.

The Easter Egg Hunt is welcomed to Panama!

Easter celebrations and traditions here are quite different than in the U.S. In the states, I didn’t realize it, but I guess I relied a bit on marketing to let me know when holidays were coming up. Commercials or seasonal displays at the grocery store are always up so early in the U.S. that it’s impossible to miss them. Here, there is virtually no marketing or commercialization of holidays, so they have a tendency to sneak up on me. The lack of commercialization probably sounds like a blessing, but holidays here can be difficult being so far away from friends and family. And I like eating Valentine’s Day/Easter/Christmas themed candy! Anyway, in rural Panama where we live, holidays are minimally celebrated since people don’t have a lot of extra money to buy holiday presents for their kids or other unessential things.

One thing that people in rural Panama do for holidays is to make a special kind of food, although it’s not much and it’s not very fancy. For Easter, many of the women make chicheme, a drink with milk, corn and rice seasoned with cinnamon (it’s pretty good if you don’t mind drinking chunky liquids!). This is a special occasion drink that is only made a few times a year and then shared with close friends/family members. Otherwise, Easter (at least in the less developed parts of Panama) has little to do with cute bunnies, baby chicks or Easter egg hunts. It is a large drinking and partying holiday here. People will drive or take the bus several hours from Panama City to go to the “interior” (the other provinces of Panama outside of the City) to be with their families. Many people go to large parties called Matanzas where they relax in the shade and drink and eat all day. At a matanza, a cow or pig is killed in the morning and then cooked and eaten all in one day with several hundred people. Another popular Easter activity is going out drinking at a baile (local dance) or to a discoteca (dance club). Lots of people also go to the beach since it is getting close to the end of the dry season now. Bracken saw a political cartoon last year that depicted Jesus on his way to church for Easter, while a crowd of people passed him going the other way to the beach with coolers full of beer.

Although the vast majority of Panamanians are Catholic (around 90% or so), we found that Easter Sunday is not a big church event. We went to the Pascua misa (Easter mass) but were surprised by the low turnout. The tiny church was only about half full! There was a baseball game that many of the men in the community were playing in at the same time, so it seemed that they all went to the game instead of to church. Although the Easter mass wasn’t a big event, there were several nights of mass leading up to Easter beginning on the Thursday before. These were focused on praying at each station of the cross and had better attendance than the Easter mass.

A few weeks before Easter, I had the idea of organizing an Easter egg hunt for the community. I had picked up an egg dying kit in the U.S. in March on a whim, and realized this would be a great chance to share the culture of the U.S. with our Panamanian friends, which can sometimes be hard to do. We started by checking with a few of the more devout Catholic in town to see what they thought of the idea. We didn’t want to offend anyone, and huevos (eggs) are often involved in the punch line of dirty jokes here, so we cleared it with the “experts” first.

After getting approval that no Catholics would be harmed in the implementation of the egg hunt, we began collecting eggs, eggs and more eggs. As anyone who has talked to us on the phone knows, chickens (and their associated annoying noises) are plentiful here. However, we were looking for hundreds of eggs. We bought 8 dozen at the nearest grocery store and managed to safely transport them back on the bus. Then we asked the school chicken project to set aside as many eggs as possible for us to buy. As anything out of the ordinary does, our request for 150 eggs caused quite a commotion. No one understood why the weird gringos were buying so many eggs, and they talked about it a lot. We tried to explain the idea of an Easter egg hunt to them, and I can only imagine how weird it sounded. We ended up buying 120 eggs from the school for $10. We also recruited our host mom to save all of her white eggs for us for about two weeks and then bought them from her (about 2 dozen more, 10 cents each). We ended up with a total of 250 eggs.

The process of dying the eggs posed a different challenge here in Panama. Nearly all of the eggs were brown because that is about all that is available here. It is hard to find white eggs, so the only ones we had were those that our host mom saved for us and we used those exclusively in the yellow dye. But, with skills that would make Martha Stewart proud, Bracken and I spent 2 days (about 12 hours total) hard-boiling and then dying the brown eggs into brilliant shades of blue, teal, purple, pink, orange, green, darker brown and yellow. They actually turned out really well, and I had a great time until extreme exhaustion hit about 10 hours into the process. I drew designs on many with crayon before dying the eggs, and even though the eggs were brown it worked quite well and we ended up with many beautiful eggs – 230 in fact (we lost about 20 in the process)!

my egg dying workstation

easter eggs before and after

Kate numbering the eggs for the raffle

The day of the egg hunt was SCORCHING HOT (as every day in April has been) but we had quite a few volunteers to help us hide the eggs in the town park. I wrote a number on each egg before we hid them, and we used the numbers to raffle off kids prizes at the end of the hunt. At the scheduled start time of 4 pm, there were only 11 kids, but by 4:15 we were mobbed by over 50 kids ready to grab eggs! Because there were so many kids, Bracken had a great idea – we turned the hunt into a scavenger hunt. Splitting the kids into two groups, we had 4 kids from each group run into the park looking for a specific design on the eggs. For example, there were eggs with hearts, stars, crosses, flowers, suns, rainbows and Los Santos logos (for provincial pride). The kids had to find 4 eggs with the specified design and be the first team to return with all 4. This worked pretty well and definitely made the activity last longer than the 5 minutes it would have taken for those kids to find all the eggs. After a few rounds of that, it was a free-for-all search, and total chaos ensued. We had a lot of egg casualties from people running and stepping on eggs, dropping eggs, etc. Everyone was allowed to collect 4 eggs each, and then we raffled off some prizes using the numbers.

some of the 230 easter eggs we hid in our town’s central park

kids playing in the central park while others search for the eggs

Bracken joins the egg hunt

Overall, it was a really fun day and I had a lot of fun dying and decorating the eggs too. It was nice to share something familiar to celebrate Easter and we definitely think the community will remember this crazy event for many years to come! Now we are headed to Coiba Island in the Pacific Ocean for a snorkeling and scuba diving trip to celebrate our 4 year Wedding Anniversary (April 23) and my 28^th Birthday (April 28). We’ve been planning this trip for 6 months and it should be incredible, so we’ll be sure to update the blog after we get back.

this little girl was so disappointed that she didn’t win a raffle prize, but I think she still had fun

two of the more avid searchers – one of them was still finding eggs in the park the next day!

the raffle winners with their eggs and prizes

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