Egg Decorating

When you live all over the world, you get to learn and experience so many new things - it's one of the wonderful things about travelling.  Many countries have different holidays, and different ways of celebrating the holidays that we have in common.  When you're raising kids around the world, you want to make sure that you experience the new holidays and traditions, while at the same time, making sure you maintain the traditions of your home culture.  You want your kids to have some shared cultural experiences with their US living peers.

With Easter, there's the ritual of decorating eggs.  Many, many cultures decorate eggs and have wonderful traditions surrounding it and it's great to learn about and experience those traditions.

In the US, as it gets close to Easter, the markets start to get all the Easter stuff ready.  There are Peeps, there are chocolate bunnies, and there are the egg dying kits.  Growing up, we would get the egg dying kit and the night before Easter dye our eggs so that they could be hidden the next morning.

Here in Brazil, egg dying doesn't seem to be as big a tradition as it is in the US.  Luckily, I had brought an extra egg dying kit.  Back in Berkeley, we had developed a tradition of gathering all the neighborhood kids together to dye eggs.  It was great fun.  So - here in Brazil we did a group dye as well.






Since I had only brought one egg dying kit, I needed to find a way to make my own dye.  I know that there are many natural methods - using red cabbage, onions, and beets, but those methods have a longer time requirement.  I finally found a great recipe for making our own dye - and they came out great.