Easter homesickness

Every Easter we would go to the mountains, as many Norwegians do. We would overload our car with luggage and in the earlier years we would fill the five hours' drive with communal singing, until we reached the cottage of my mum's parents in a mountain range in Southern Norway, a cottage with a turf roof and no running water or electricity, heated and lit by kerosene, and with a lovely little outhouse we had to dig away the snow to get to. As Norwegians like it when they go on holiday.

The days would be spent skiing, cross-country skiing that is, basically meaning we would walk into the mountains with our skis on, normally trying to reach some peak or other. My father and grandfather would always say that if we sat down we would become cold, so our breaks would be taken standing up, and last only long enough for us to gulp down some squash and devour the Penguin and Caramel bars my uncle had brought from Scotland. Removing the wrapping of the chocolate with mittons on is unfortunately an art form I've never quite mastered. But if we were lucky, there would be what we call "Easter Weather", with strong, warm sun, and we would gradually take off mittons and scarfs and hats, and maybe even our anorak jackets, which we would tie around our waists. Then the mountains would be full of people from the South Coast, digging  seats in the snow where they would sit and enjoy the sun and eat oranges, watching their kids building ski jumps out of snow and trying to actually jump on them, with varying luck. Old habits die hard, though, and even if it was more than warm enough, we would hardly ever sit down - you can't sit around all day if you want to reach the peaks -, and it's only in the last years my father and grandfather have softened a bit and let us sit down from time to time. We've even tried to bring oranges, but never quite warmed to them - why would anyone want to ski with sticky hands?

I would normally lag a little bit behind, where I could concentrate on my thoughts uninterruptedly, making up some story in my head. The others would maybe stop for a minute or two, and just as I caught up with them, they would start again. I would rest a bit and start later than them, and my father would get annoyed and ask why I always had to do that, whereupon I would complain that I would have gotten no rest otherwise. I never told them I would have walked behind them anyway - I didn't want anyone to distract me from my story.  Usually we would have a lot of energy and reach the peaks without major problems, but if my mum came skiing with us, all us kids would suddenly feel extremely tired and she would have to walk behind with us listening to us complaining, and she would resort to telling stories or promise us that there would be trees full of candy by the next lake to coax us into keeping on.

The sun is extremely bright in the mountains, as it is reflected by the snow, and we would have to wear sun glasses in order not to go snow blind. If the weather was good we would work up quite a tan, but be completely white around the eyes due to the sun glasses, making us look like owls.

Before returning to the cottage someone would have to go to the hole made in the ice on the lake and fetch water. Our grandmother would be waiting for us at the cottage, and after changing from our wet woolen underwear into our indoor clothing, we would all sit down for coffee and cake. My mum would often have made her chocolate cake, which is the best in the world, and brought it with her for this purpose. It would taste absolutely delicious after skiing, but if there was ever anything left over after Easter which we would try to eat in the car on the way home, we would discover that it had acquired a strong taste of kerosene.

In the evenings we would play card games, and everyone would join in except my father and grandmother, who both hate playing cards. They would instead try to read in the dim light from the kerosene lamps, while the rest of us would be arguing over our card games, gloating when we won, sulking when we lost, and always disagreeing on what to play next. My grandmother would always comment on how extremely unprofessional we were: one is supposed to be silent while playing cards.

On Good Friday we would meet with some friends of my grandparents, either at their cottage or ours. There would be tons of cake, and one of my grandparents' friends would always talk twice as much as everyone else, exaggerating wildly as he was telling stories, while his wife corrected him mildly.

At the beginning of the week we would decorate the cottage for Easter, with eggs and chickens and all things yellow. Starting Palm Sunday, my mum would read the appropriate passages from the Bible for us throughout the week. On Easter Eve she and my uncle would fill pâpier-maché eggs with candy, each of them containing a rebus explaining to whom it belonged, and we would then hunt for them around the cottage. Come Easter Sunday we would boil eggs with onion to make them yellow, and sing psalms over breakfast. We would never quite agree on the lyrics, so at times some genius would decide to get the old psalm book out of the book shelf, and would then be singing tons of obscure verses no one else even knew existed.

If we were lucky, the sun would have been strong in the city as well, so that the snow would have melted away prior to our return. When we were small, our friends who had been home over Easter would come running over as quickly as we came home, eager to see us. It felt absolutely wonderful to walk with light summer shoes on bare asphalt again, and we could finally begin playing Chinese jump rope after winter. My mum would tell us off for taking off our jackets, as the spring sun is treacherous, saying we would get ill from the air which was still quite cold. After such a long winter, though, how were we to resist taking off our jackets at the first opportunity?

Some things have changed over the last years. Of course I don't have any mum to scold me for taking off my jacket anymore, and I have probably grown too sensible now to do it anyway. My grandparents and uncle have not been going to the mountains the last few Easters, and we now have electric lights powered by a solar panel, so the food we take home doesn't taste as strongly of kerosene anymore. But my father and siblings and I have still been going skiing in the mountains every Easter, keeping to the traditions as much as we can. This year, however, I will be spending my Easter doing a language course in Cairo. It will definitely be different. But good, I hope. However, as Easter approaches, you might have to put up with a little homesickness on my part.

Me skiing

My parents in the mountains