Lent, Pussywillow Sunday, Easter

Lent is not a celebration, but a period of preparation for Easter. How strictly people observe Lent varies a great deal. In some areas, parishioners follow the Western model and give up something that they like. They do not avoid meat, eggs, and dairy products, the traditional dietary restrictions imposed during Lent.

Masliana or Shrove – Lent is preceded by a period of indulgence. The weeks prior to Lent are meat fare, when meat is still allowed, followed by milk fare week, or Masliana. In the West, Shrove, especially Shrove Tuesday is a big time of celebration and licence before the strictures of Lent. In Ukraine, Masliana is celebrated over the course of the entire week with thin pancakes, more like crepes than western pancakes, revelry, and the burning of an effigy at the end of the week. Why it did not come up in interviews is not clear. It could be the fault of the interviewer or it could be that this practice was overshadowed by the much more important event of Easter. It could also be that the demands of prairie farming did not allow for celebration. 

Preparing for Easter during Lent was considered very important and was extensively discussed. People made sure that the house was clean. They also talked about pysanky, the intricate wax-resist eggs that many people associate with being Ukrainian. Preparing foods for the Easter basket was also important.
Pysanky – on the prairies, especially in recent times, have become gloriously colourful and intricate. Ukrainian women, and some men, make pysanky for enjoyment. They make pysanky for decoration and to be placed in the Easter basket blessed in church. Shirley Korpatinsky of Sheho, Saskatchewan boasted a long tradition of pysanka writing in her family. She also kept a set of 100-year-old and home-made pysanka tools that had belonged to her grandmother. The tradition did not end with Shirley and her two daughters sold enough pysanky to put themselves through the University of Saskatchewan. Many people write pysanky to sell and the buyers are often non-Ukrainians who buy the items as art objects and souvenirs. The designs on the eggs themselves range from patterns handed down in the family over generations to patterns found in books and to designs available on the internet. Pysanky are kept from year to year and many people display them in their living rooms, often alongside their desiccated wedding korovai.

Palm Sunday, more commonly called Pussywillow Sunday or Verbna nedilia is an important event. Some Catholic churches will use palms just as Western churches do. In Ukraine, palms were not available and were replaced by pussywillow twigs, one of the first plants to show signs of life in spring. Most Ukrainian Canadian churches, both Orthodox and Eastern rite Catholic, will use pussywillows. Parishioners bring pussywillow twigs to church and have them blessed. Most churches also provide some branches for those parishioners who cannot bring their own.
Parishioners are supposed to hit each other with blessed pussywillows (not hard, of course) and recite a little ditty that announces the coming of Easter. The little rhyme reminds people that Easter is coming in one week.

Blessed pussywillows, like holy water, are powerful items and are used for many of the same purposes as holy water. No one claims to eat them, but people do use them to avert storms in much the same way as Nellie Kotylak of Montmartre used holy water. Blessed pussywillows are planted in gardens to help crops grow. Like holy water, blessed pussywillows cannot be simply thrown away and must be burned so that their smoke ascends to heaven.

The food aspect of Easter is very important because what is blessed in the Easter basket is consumed and thus believed to have a direct effect on the person who eats it.

The typical Easter basket contains a paska and/or babka. Paska refers to a mildly sweet bread of braided dough, often decorated with a cross to symbolize Easter. The babka is much sweeter and often contains raisins. It is baked in a tall receptacle like a tin can yielding a column topped with a rounded head. The head is decorated with icing sugar and symbols of Easter such as XB for Christ is Risen. While some people interviewed purchased their Easter baked goods, many more said that they or a family member knew how to make them so that the paska and babka were baked at home.

Other items in the basket would be ham or, less frequently, sausage, butter, a condiment of horseradish mixed with beets, sometimes a sweet cheese paska was part of the basket, and hard-boiled eggs that would be eaten rather than used for decoration were obligatory. All food that was used to break the fast had to be blessed food, which means that even any salt that was to be used for the Easter breakfast needed to be blessed. Most Easter baskets contained a pysanka or two for decoration. The food would be displayed on an embroidered cloth or covered by one. Easter basket cloths used to be embroidered at home and some still are, although Easter basket cloths imported from Ukraine are becoming more common.
The food in the basket would be used to break the fast on Easter morning. Only blessed food was to be eaten and, because the food was blessed, any leftovers needed to be disposed of properly. Mostly this applied to the shells of the eggs that were eaten. Some people would bury these in the garden to help plants grow. Others would peel their eggs before taking them to church so that the egg shells did not need to be disposed of in a special way. 

The act of Easter basket blessing is considered so important that rural clergy do their best to have at least a very brief blessing service at every church in their care for the sake of those who cannot travel to a large central place where a full celebratory Easter service is held. Modifications have also been made to accommodate climate demands. Because the Easter basket contains meat, original custom dictated that it was not to be brought into church. Thus a typical basket blessing is held outdoors, after a procession that goes three times around the church. Prairie weather does not always permit outdoor activity and so many churches do allow their parishioners to bring baskets into the church for the service and the blessing.