The miracle of the rejuvenating spring had been witnessed by many thousand generations before men dared claim as a certainty the great hope which its parable indicated--before human soul dared boldly believe that it was itself as deathless as the germ of slumbering over winter in the buried seed.
Since the Conqueror of Death, by the triumph which the world is to-day celebrating, certified the validity of that belief, the season in which Nature annually illustrates the appointed victory of life over death has become the most significant of all festivals. At Christmas the world is glad as children are glad--with the unconsidered glee of youth. At Eastertide it rejoices as men rejoice in the presence of deliverance from fear--with recollected voices and bosoms girt with thankfulness.
The austerity of the earth and sky prepares to yield to the conquering sweetness of spring. Already the winds caress with an unfamiliar softness, the earth beguiles with a dimly green prophecy of vernal liveliness. Nature is timidly yearning heavenward. But the hymn of awakening life is not mere telluric nor aerial--it sings out in the souls of men who have considered the mystery of life and its persistency under the sod and through the chill of winter's apparent death. To such Easter Day--set in the midst of a season which witnesses as far as anything earthly can witness, to the verity of a spiritual fact; coinciding with the ancient festivals which celebrated the immemorial human hope of immortality, dimly adumbrated in the dramaturgy of Greek, Scandinavian and Aryau; but consecrated newly to the rising from the tomb of the Man of Galilee--to such Easter Day stands for the chiefest affirmation or religion, the most consoling and heartening thought that mind and heart are justified in entertaining. That life does not shudder and perish at the grave; that beyond it somewhere in the warmth of God's sun and in the benignity of His nearer presence human spirits shall still have part in the joy of life refined, etherealized, made holy--neither philosophy nor religion has another teaching so solemnly precious as this.
How To Arrange A Children's Easter Monday Party by Louise E. Dew, 1904
From the beginning to the end, the children's Easter party must be as unique and attractive as time and ingenuity can make it. All the details are to be planned with care, not excluding the sending out of the invitations. Invitations are to be written with violet ink on pure white note paper, at the top of which is a hand-painted little yellow chic holding a single violet in its beak. The point on the envelope flap should also have a chick painted on it, with a violet in its beak and one below the flap.
Don't forget to teach the children how to paint Easter eggs!
As the little guests arrive the young hostess should present them with boutonnieres of pansies with which the basket which she carries on her arm is filled. Violet colored ones should be given to the little girls and yellow ones to the little boys.
The dining room decorations should be entirely in yellow and violet pansies and smilax. A window box should be filled with these dainty blossoms, and they are to be massed in crystal bowls on the sideboard.
Whenever an egg is used for a week before Easter, and end should be chipped off and the contents removed. The shell should then be rinsed with water, and when the shells have generously accumulated they should be dyed violet and yellow along with the regular Easter eggs. A pretty arrangement for the shells is to fasten a knotted end of violet and yellow ribbon to each one with a drop of glue, covering the broken end with a circle of gold paper. These ribbons should be of unequal lengths and suspended in a mass close to the chandelier for a decorative effect.
Underneath the egg shells a large white crepe paper egg should be suspended by violet and yellow ribbons. The heads of tiny yellow chickens, should be peeping out of the egg, as if they were just breaking the shell. Attached to the necks of the chicks should be violet and yellow ribbon leaders, arranged alternately, and passed to the place cards of each small guest. The cards will consist of diminutive oblongs on which tiny yellow chicks and violets are painted, with a quotation about flowers and Easter.
The paper egg center piece will contain dainty souvenirs of the occasion, which may be pulled out during the interim between the luncheon and dessert or after all the food has been served.
In the center of the table make a nest of smilax and fill it with pansies and saucy little egg-shell faces, painted or sketched in India ink. Their faces may represent demure little maidens, popular cartoons or little creatures from the woodlands. These odd little egg people, peering from the smilax nest, will furnish the children with a great deal of amusement while they are eating, and will afterward make appropriate souvenirs.
The menu card at each place will be in the shape of a snow-white swan, cut of deckled paper. The head and wings are cut in one piece, and the tail in another. After printing the menu in violet ink on the tail, the bits of yellow and violet baby ribbon attached to it should be passed around the neck of the swan, which will hold the head in position with that proud curve for which the swan is noted.
These menu cards may be purchased if one is not handy with scissors and pen. The list should read:
Menu
Chicken Sandwiches
Apple Salad
Cream Cheese Eggs
Olives
Egg Punch
Easter Eggs
Angel Sugar Nests
Ice Cream
Assorted Nuts
Candy
Fruit Phosphate
Cake
Cut the sandwiches in egg-shapes before serving them.Individual salad made of apples should be served with them in white paper cases tinted yellow and violet and imbedded in leaves of parsley. Roll the olives in powdered sugar, to resemble eggs. Cream cheese, eggs can be made out of cottage cheese, mixed with cream and rolled into the shape of eggs additionally. Each one should have a large walnut meat pressed firmly into the side of the "egg." Serve on crisp curled lettuce made into a nest. The punch will be simple egg-nogg, of which most children are fond, with nutmeg, vanilla and fruit syrup flavoring.
Easter eggs make an appropriate dessert, wholesome enough to satisfy the heart of a hygienist, and yet delightful to all children. They are made of velvety blanc mange or sparkling translucent jelly. Serve these either piled in a nest of stifly whipped cream or accompanied by a boat of sauce. The prettiest way is to serve an old-fashioned bird's nest in jelly.
To make, empty the contents of egg shell through a fair sized hole in the large end. Rinse the shells and set upright in a pan of flour or cracked ice, if gelatine is used. Fill with the jelly or blanc mange, and when cold and firm peel the egg shell from around it. A pint of jelly will usually fill six, if colored eggs are preferred, use the color paste which is sold by grocers, and which is perfectly harmless. Harlequin eggs may be made by using remnants of different colors, letting each one harden, then adding another color, until the shell is filled. Bewitching rainbow effects will be the result.
To make the nest, use a mould of jelly partly full. When hardened, pile gelatine eggs on top. Arrange over and about them a suitable quantity of "straw" yellow sponge sugar, which any confectioner can supply, or orange peel cut in tiny shreds. Angel sugar nests may be made out of angel food, cut round, and with a depression in the center. This cake should be piled high with candy eggs in all colors. The ice cream may be served an egg mould. A simple and harless phosphate may be home-made, and should in the shape of eggs, with the aid of consist of the juices of oranges, lemons and pineapple, with sugar water and cracked ice added.
Make the cake in the shape of a big egg and frost it yellow. Surmount the cake with tiny yellow and violet candles to light as the cake is being presented and after the first course of sandwiches, salad and relishes clear the table for the chick centerpiece. This impressive "chicken pie," made of yellow and violet crepe paper and covered with artificial chicks is set in the center of a hay or straw arrangement quickly assembled in the center of the table. Violet and yellow ribbon leaders should be placed within reach of each guest around the table. These leaders are tied to the souvenir egg cups, sprayed with hand-painted pansies. Each child's place setting should consist of a gilded egg with corresponding initials of the guest along with a diminutive nest of green moss on top of a plate, piled high with candy eggs off to one side of the dessert plates. Serve the cake and ice cream and wait for the children to finish before encouraging them to pull their ribbon leaders at your signal, whereupon they will be rewarded with amusing little snapping bon-bons.
After luncheon, organize an egg contest as a surprise event. Present a large hen's egg and ask the children to guess how large the circumference of the egg is. Give everyone time to answer and then reward the closest guess with a prize in the shape of a papier mache chick or something similar.
A ping pong or small billard table will make an excellent "lawn" on which to roll the colored Easter eggs, which will be provided by the "host child." A game may be made of the egg-rolling and prizes offered. (edited version)
A contemporary presentation of a children's Easter party table.
Additional suggestions for Children's Easter parties:
Easter, like Christmas, is a season of great rejoicing throughout the Christian world, writes George B. Catlin in the Detroit News. The two might be termed the alpha and the omega of Christian festivals, since one celebrates the nativity and the other the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from death and the grave.
As the early Christian records are fragmentary and imperfect it is impossible to determine when the celebration of Easter began. The early Christians of the church in the East were mostly converts from Judaism and these Christians continued the observance of the principal feasts and fasts of their ancestors, the ancient Israelites.
The death and resurrection of Christ occurred at about the time of the Passover, which Jesus and his disciples had gone to Jerusalem to observe. The Last Supper, held in an "upper room" of a private home in Jerusalem, by some authorities supposed to be in the home of the mother of St. Mark, was the Feast of the Passover.
The only allusion in the New Testament that would indicate a very early observance of Easter, as a feast celebrating the Resurrection, is in the first collection of the letters of St. Paul to the Christians of the church in Corinth; fifth chapter and seventh and eighth verses: "Purge out the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, even as ye are unleavened. For our passover also has been sacrificed, even Christ: wherefore let us keep the feast, not with the old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth."
In the subsequent records the first allusion to Easter is in connection with a dispute between two groups of Christians as to the date of the observance when, in the last decade of the second century of the Christian era, Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, and Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, wrote letters to Victor of Rome, differing with him on the subject of the proper date for the feast.
The crucifixion occurred on the sixth day of the week, or Friday. The following day was the Jewish Sabbath and the Resurrection occurred on the first day of the week. The early Christians of Jewish ancestry wished to signify their separation from their former faith, so, presently, they ceased to observe the Jewish Sabbath and made their holy day Sunday, the first day of the week.
The Jewish calendar is based on the phases of the moon, having months of 29 and 30 days alternately. The days of the month in the Jewish calendar, therefore, change from year to year during a period of 19 years or the metonic cycle, at the end of which period the phases of the moon reoccur on the same day. A partial readjustment of the dates is achieved by introducing an extra or interciary month in the third, sixth, eight, eleventh, fourteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth years.
The years having this interciary month are known as "embolismic" years. The length of the Jewish year varies from 353 to 385 days and because of this irregularity the Jewish new year may occur anywhere between September 5 and October 5. All other dates, including the Passover, are movable because of this peculiarity of the calendar.
In 325 A. D. the date of the Easter feast, in dispute because of calendar and religious differences, was finally settled, but this did not obviate all difficulties. Because of the imperfections of the Julian calendar days of the month and year began to fall behind. By the year 1582 the calendar was 10 days behind and the vernal equinox, supposed to fall invariably on March 21, fell upon the 11th. This caused difficulty in fixing the correct date of the Easter celebration reformed calendar was invented and adopted.
This festival was always preceded by a fast of some duration. At first the fast began on Good Friday and continued for 40 hours. A little later it was extended to three days and later still it was extended to a week known as Holy week, during which there was general abstinence from flesh meats. The first mention of the fast, corresponding closely to our present Lenten period, occurs in the fifth canon of the council of Nicea in which it is styled "the quadrigesima" or 40 days.
Synoptical Julian-Gregorian Calendar – compare the Julian and Gregorian calendars for any date between 1582 and 2100 using this side-by-side reference.
A display of Jadeite Fire King in an antique
shop. Rarer blue Azurite milk glass tableware is also shown.
Jadeite (kitchenware), also known as "Fire King Jade-ite", is a type of glass tableware made of Jade-green opaque milk glass, popular in the United States in the mid-20th century. A blue variety called "Azur-ite" was also produced for several years. Jade-ite and Azur-ite were both produced by Anchor Hocking. It should not to be confused with jadite, a green jade-coloured shade of vaseline glass product made in the early 20th century.
The "Jadeite Fire King" brand was first produced by the United States glassware firm Anchor Hocking in the 1940s. Most of Anchor Hocking's output of Jadeite was between 1945 and 1975. A durable product in a fashionable color, it became the most popular product made by Anchor Hocking.
The glassware's popularity also makes it an affordable and popular
collectable today. Reproduction items are produced today by various
manufacturers. Fire King Jadeite is still produced in reproduction lines
by Anchor Hocking, which designs variations into its reproductions so
that they are not mistaken for originals, to maintain the integrity of
the genuine status of original Jadeite articles.
Jeannette Glassware was a United States manufacturer of green milk glass tableware similar in appearance to Jadeite Fire King. Kitchenware in other materials, such as aluminum canisters and bread
containers, were produced in the mid-20th century in the same shade of
Jadeite green, to match the glassware. White milk glass is an opaque or translucent, milky white or colored glass, blown or pressed into a wide variety of shapes. First made in Venice in the 16th century, colors include blue, pink, yellow, brown, black, and the white that led to its popular name.
Decorative pedestal milk glass bowl.
First made in Venice
in the 16th century, colors include blue, pink, yellow, brown, black,
and white. 19th-century glass makers called milky white opaque glass "opal glass". The name milk glass is relatively recent. The white color is achieved through the addition of an opacifier, e.g. tin dioxide or bone ash. Milkware was made into decorative dinnerware, lamps, vases, and costume jewelry, milk glass was highly popular during the fin de siecle. Pieces made for the wealthy of the Gilded Age are known for their delicacy and beauty in color and design, while Depression glass
pieces of the 1930s and '40s are less so. Perhaps one of the most
famous uses of opal glass (or at least the most viewed example) was for
the four faces of the information booth clock at Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan.
