Sagada Easter
Sunday, April 12, 2009
I last spent Easter Sunday in Sagada more than a decade ago. My sister and I woke up really early to attend the Easter Sunrise service. It was held at the Calvary, on top of a mountain bounding the Echo Valley. I will never forget the memory of singing Easter hymns while the sun rose. It was everything that Easter promised - a new hope, a new day. (Photo Credit: moongirl's blog)
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9 comments:
A very happy Easter to you and your family.
i-dekkan
Thanks i-dekkan. Hope you had a wonderful celebration too. The boys went egg hunting at a neighbor's place; and we spent a full afternoon there until the early evening. Will hope to share some photos soon.
Have a blessed week.
a high school friend of mine from sagada has told me that sagada kids had been doing easter egg hunting since the 1980s. how true? in manila, egg hunting is only celebrated in malls.
@PQ
i remember egg-hunting in Sagada ever since I was in kinder (yes, 80s) and maybe earlier. (note: i am also from sagada.)
this is how i remember it: during the saturdays before easter, volunteers would gather at church or in the coop store to boil and color the eggs. community volunteers usually pop in to color a few eggs and then move on as other volunteers come. thats why the end product are a very varied collection of apparently randomly collored eggs.
initially, some volunteers would wake up very early (3am/4am) during easter sunday and hide the eggs in the designated egg-hunting areas. i remember a time it was in the baseball ground, another time in the cemetery, another time in latang, another time in the st joseph area, etc. when the easter mass is finished, the kids are then instructed to go look for the hidden eggs in the designated areas.
i also remember my older brother telling me to wake up as early as the volunteers so that i can secretly watch where they are hiding the eggs. therefore when it is time to 'hunt' for the eggs, i would know exactly where to look hehe.
anyway, there was a time where the adults decided that a lot of the hidden eggs were too difficultly hidden such that the kids were not able to find them. resulting in wasted eggs.
so it was decided to hide pieces of paper instead. and the pieces of paper would have written on them things like "1 egg" or "2 eggs". the kid finds these and "redeems" it from the adults with the crates of eggs. this way, there would be no waste of perfectly good easter egg.
and then it was observed that some kids, usually the bigger ones tended to have huge hauls of eggs (10+) while some of the little kids would have no eggs at the end of the egg-hunt resulting in a lot of crying kids during the egg-hunt. and of course, the idea was that each kid should have a good time.
and so another change was introduced. this time, kids go looking for these pieces of paper but at the end of it, all kids fall in line and each gets one or two colorful eggs. this way, everyone is happy.
then, since there is no longer any connection between the "hunted" pieces of paper and the number of eggs received, some kids refused to look for the pieces of paper and went straight to the queue. thus it was decided that after the easter mass, parlor games are to be played. and winning kids were given prices in eggs. after a number of parlor games were played, the remaining kids who did not win went to a line to receive eggs.
the last time i attended an easter service, i also noticed another change. not only did the kids have their eggs, the adults were given hot coffee with bread as well.
this, @PQ, is the evolution of egg hunting in sagada.
JACK's RICE... that's a nice long comment worthy of a blog post already. Thanks for responding. You actually had a longer recollection of Easter Egg hunting in Sagada. I don't know about the parlor games anymore.
PQ, I couldn't add anymore to JACK's RICE answer. Its the perfect question to your answer.
i remember being in Sagada during easter sunday last 2004/2005. the early morning mass at the calvary was still quite an experience. this was the year that i saw the parlor-games before the eggs. i asked the parlor game organizer, our friend L about it, and her explanation was what i wrote earlier.
however i wanted to queue up on the easter eggs, i was handed a mug of steaming coffee and tinapay. oh well, i sometimes forget my age :)
@Jack's Rice
Your chronicle of Sagada's Easter egg hunt history sounded like the evolution of a socialist movement LOL
chang, hahaha! thanks for dropping by. jack's rice comment is a masterpiece. it's the best one i've got as a comment so far. teka, andyan na ba siya?
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