Easter Sunday has always been a big deal in my family. My grandparents are from the Ukraine, and in the Ukraine, Easter is the holiday of all holidays. Preparations begin weeks before the feast, centering mostly around making special foods like holubtsi and varenyky (more commonly known as perogies) and decorating pysanky (Ukrainian Easter eggs).

I decorated my first pysanka at the age of 4 or 5. Every year, shortly after Ash Wednesday, my mother would take her jars of rainbow egg dyes out of the cupboard and set them out on the kitchen counter. In the weeks that followed, my mother, my sisters and I would make egg after egg for friends, teachers, and relatives. It was my favorite time of the year.

Ukrainians have been decorating pysanky since before the birth of Christ. When the Ukrainians became a Christian people in the late 900s, they recognized that the egg is a perfect symbol for the ressurrection, and they continued carrying on the tradition, giving it new meaning as they added Christian symbols to their intricate designs.

With the over-commercialism of every major holiday--including Easter--our symbols are often co-opted and consequently lose their meaning. For most of us, Easter eggs are objects to find on a hunt, magical delights filled with chocolate and jelly beans, put in their hiding places by the ever-elusive Easter Bunny.

For me, making pysanky is as much an act of subversion as it is a family tradition. It is a way to reclaim the meaning of Easter and its symolism using the very same object--an egg--that our consumeristic culture tries to make into a mass-produced, mass-marketed holiday product. It is a tradition for which I have not made much time in the last several years, but one that I am hoping to revive as I think about the values and beliefs that I want to pass on to my son.

What are your Easter traditions? What are the ways in which you reclaim the meaning of Easter?