Boys get boiled, decorated eggs from the girls.
One of the legends says that one day Jesus Christ and Saint Peter came to the farm and asked for bread.. The housekeeper didn’t have any bread and offered them boiled eggs. After their leaving she wanted to throw the shells out. She was surprised because the shells turned golden. Since that time she used to give the eggs to pilgrims every anniversary of this visit.
Decorating eggs has long history in the Czech republic, especially in South Bohemia and in Moravia.
Of course the easiest way of decorating is to put boiled eggs into the colour (traditional colour is red) and decorate them with self-adhesive labels.
More interesting and more beautiful is using the wax. There are a few ways of this technology:
The first way is to paint coloured or clean eggs with a dissolved colour wax (it’s possible to dissolve colour candles or wax crayons). A simple design is used – only dots and dashes.
Another way is to put clean eggs into the dissolved wax, to engrave the design into the wax (again dots and dashes), to put the eggs into the colour and to dissolve the wax on the eggs again.
To paint the clean eggs with a wax design, to put the eggs into the colour and to dissolve the wax on the eggs is a similar way.
A different way is to enscrape the design into the colour, the design can be more complicated.
The way favourite in my family is not so complicated. We boil the eggs in the water with onion peels. The eggs get beautiful red-brown natural colour. It’s possible to make a simple design on the eggs with the leaves of grass. The leaf is put on the egg, the egg is packed to the old nylon tights and boiled in the onion water.
There are not many people who can use these technologies well. In our time we are very busy to keep up traditions and they don’t seem to be so important for us. Let’s hope these traditions will survive.

Jana Erwerthová