Easter Up North

Gleðilega Páska! Hann er upprisinn líka á Íslandi. (Happy Easter! He is risen in Iceland too.)

It’s fascinating to experience the holiday celebrations of another culture, and I’m glad that Easter came after I’d been in Iceland long enough to have some (tenuous!) handle on the language—at least enough to appreciate some of the subtleties of the season.

First of all, Easter is a pretty big deal here—much more so than in the US. Not that people are particularly religious (though everybody seems to acquire some religion for themselves around the big holidays, out of nostalgia if nothing else), but because Lutheranism is the state religion, it was law until fairly recently that all businesses had to be closed on Good Friday, East Sunday, and Easter Monday. It’s no longer law, but it’s more or less still part of the culture. Grocery stores, bookstores, many restaurants—all closed those three days, and many of them closed on Saturday too. The library and university take this to an extreme and are closed from Holy Thursday all the way through Easter Monday—which was a serious problem given that this is our spring break and all of us in the masters program were counting on spending the whole week holed up in the library working madly on projects and papers. But for the people who work in these institutions, it really is a nice enforced vacation to spend with their families…sitting around home doing nothing because nothing is open.

Like Easter in America, though, Easter in Iceland has been candified. Principal exhibit: the Páskaegg tradition. Apparently this “Easter Egg” is customary all over northern Europe, but I’d never seen it before I came here. Big (sometimes giant) chocolate eggs, filled with all sorts of candies like a piñata. You can get small ones, but I’ve seen them bigger than soccer balls, and I just imagine the visions of sugar plums that dance in the heads of children when they see those at the grocery store.

I’d like to throw in a side note that the palms they use here in church for Palm Sunday are unlike any other palm I’ve ever seen. They look more like hedge trimmings that someone picked up from the yard. But then, this is ICEland—what do they know from palms?

I had the opportunity to sing with the choir at a Lutheran service on Holy Thursday (Skírdagur here—which to the best of my understanding means something like Cleansing Day, related to the word for baptism but probably a reference to the washing of the feet at the Last Supper). I’d never been to a Lutheran service before and was so touched to see that it was strikingly similar to a Catholic one—I felt right at home, in fact, even though it was all in Icelandic.

Then on Good Friday (Föstudagurinn langi—Long Friday, because you’re traditionally not supposed to eat or do anything fun!), we experienced another Icelandic tradition: Páskasnjór—Easter snow. It came in a heavy wave right around 3 o’clock, darkening the sky like a reference to the Gospel and dropping at least half an inch of snow on the poor crocuses and budding bushes. I think it’s indicative of the climate that the Icelanders have a special term for snow that falls right at Easter time. (I think it’s also indicative of the environment that they have a special term for a flash flood caused by a volcano erupting under a glacier—jökullhlaup—but that’s another story.)

In the Middle Ages they called Holy Saturday “Páska aptann”—Easter Eve—but I haven’t heard the term used in a modern context. Just like in the US, poor Holy Saturday gets rather overshadowed by the two momentous days on either side of it. We spent it navigating around the icy patches and snowdrifts.

But Easter Sunday itself was magnificent. Icelandic weather threw a party to celebrate, giving us bright sun and 40-degree temperatures that had the Icelanders turning out in droves to sport their spring fashions (open-toed shoes! Here!) and to let their children play outside. The funny thing was, I felt that it was warm too—so warm that I took a walk into Laugardalur, a lovely park area in a suburb to the east of downtown.

It was lovely to see the churches all decked out for Easter, ringing their bells like mad and garnering the biggest crowds I’ve ever seen at services. Funnily enough, around here they don’t decorate with lilies, they decorate with daffodils. I suppose this is because lilies probably need a warmer climate to grow, but then again, maybe the Icelanders (and, I’m told, all of Scandinavia) don’t know what they’re missing, because their term for daffodil is, in fact, “Páskalilja”—Easter lily.

And today is Annar í Páskum—the second day of Easter, when everything remains closed and parents try to keep their children contained as they recover from the effects of those giant chocolate Páskaeggjar. By the way, is it just me, or is it kind of odd that in Icelandic, the terms for both Christmas and Easter are plural? I can’t figure out how that happened.

So this was my experience of Easter in Iceland. It was really a lovely celebration and not at all diminished for having conducted in a language I can’t actually claim to speak. Such is the power of the holiday. I hope you all had a very beautiful and blessed Easter, however you celebrated it!