I was talking to some friends about hiding and rolling Easter eggs. Back home (Norn Ireland) we always hid the chocolate Easter eggs on Easter Sunday then hunted round the garden for them, and then painted/dyed the real eggs on Easter Monday and rolled them down a hill (I found an earlier thread on this - apparently known as pace-egging).

Anyway, the people I talked to (one English, one Dutch, one Swedish) all looked at me as if I had two heads when I mentioned these practices. One of them conceded that they'd heard of real eggs being hidden and hunted, but they themselves didn't do this. How common a practice is it? I had a non-religious (irreligious?!) upbringing, but this was a custom we practised (without questioning or analysing it) because it was carrying on a tradition that my parents and their families had done (hey - it's the folk process!). I realise the egg-rolling is supposed to correspond to the rolling of the stone away from Jesus' tomb, but why the painting and why the hiding and hunting on Easter Sunday?

(On another note - for years we would gather lovely yellow whin blossom to dye our eggs. It wasn't 'til I was about 18 years old that we couldn't gather any that year, but when I expressed disappointment my dad informed me he'd been using yellow food colouring for years anyway as the whins had bugger all effect! Devastating...)