orichalcum

So, the two major spring religious festivals with which I am best acquainted have both developed auxiliary customs of "treasure-hunting" as a separate game involving both kids and adults. I'm writing this post because I was realizing from various conversations that the nature of these hunts varies dramatically from family to family, and I'm curious to see if I can get any sort of majority opinion on the most common practices.


Easter Egg Hunt: So, in my family, children would wake up early on Easter morning and run out to the living room. The first step was to find the mostly-empty Easter basket (except for the chocolate bunny), which was usually hidden in a fairly obvious place, like under the piano. Then, the actual hunt would begin, for about a dozen dyed hard-boiled eggs (depending on the number of children) and about 60-100 (depending on the number of children) inch-sized foil-wrapped solid chocolate eggs, which the grownups had carefully hidden in and around all the public areas of the house the night before - resting on picture frames, inside vases, and, most memorably, inside the guitar. It's very hard to get eggs _out_ of a guitar, for the record. Once all the eggs, or at least, all the eggs we could find (sometimes we'd find one or two months later) had been located, we could wake up our parents and settle down for a nice Easter breakfast.

Apparently, this is much more elaborate than in many homes. How did those of you who had egg hunts as kids do it?

Afikomen: At most of the Passover Seders I attended when of relevant age, the practice was for the adult conducting the Seder to hide the Afikomen, normally in a relatively obvious location in the same room as the Seder, and then for the children to find it. Whichever child found it turned it in for a reward (most often a book, although sometimes a small toy.) However, I've now been to other Seders where the child hides it and the parent has to find it, or where money is involved. What was your practice?

And, of course, this all begs the larger question of why we have these hunting rituals, which at least in the case of the Afikomen appear to be several centuries if not millennia old. One possibility is simply the practical answer that it gives children an activity to do without disrupting parents during an important religious rite. But this seems simplistic. To me, it evokes metaphors and images of spring and of the coming of new life and hope which is at the center of both Pesach and Easter. (Easter, of course, takes much of its symbolism directly from Pesach, given the nature of the Last Supper.) The good things/life have been buried or lost, and it is up to the child, the visible symbol of growth and new life, to find them and bring them back into the light. To quote the Calvinist motto of my dad's high school: "Post tenebras, lux." After the shadows, light. Winter is over! Let us celebrate the eggs and crocuses and babies of the world! We are free at last from the darkness.