Easter time was always great fun at our house. It was one of the few times during the year that all of us got new clothes; Christmas was the other time. My mother always bought the best she could afford. She kept away from trendy clothing and bought good basic styles. My sister and I would get either a spring coat and dress, or a suit. My three brothers got new suits even if the younger ones would have fit into the older ones outgrown suits. We also got new shoes, and underwear. The boys had their choice of boxers or briefs and the girls always got the silky kind of slips and panties instead of the usual cotton ones.
My mother always made a big deal out of dying eggs for Easter. However, our eggs didn’t look like any other eggs I ever saw. Most families used food coloring to dye their eggs, but we used onionskins. The week before Easter, my mother would send my sister and me to the food store with express instructions to get a pound of onions, and then to pull the skins off as many onions as we could and put them in the bag with the onions we were purchasing. Usually, this was no problem but one year the food store had a new manager. He came running over and slapped our hands and told us to stop playing in the onions. We waited until he walked away and continued to grab as many onionskins as we could before going to the check out counter.
Saturday, the day before Easter, we would take the week old eggs my father got from the farm and scrubbed the yucky stuff off the shells. According to my father, week old eggs hard-boil better. After doing this, we soaked the onionskins we got from the grocery store in a large pan of water. Now came the best part of the egg dying. We had already rounded up all the spools that had just a little bit of threads left on them and brought them to the kitchen. When all of our supplies were on the kitchen table, my mother would plunge her hand into the pan containing the soaking onionskins and bring up several of the larger skins. She expertly covered the cleaned eggs, one at a time, with the onionskins and, using thread from one of the spools, wrapped the thread round and round encasing the egg with the onionskins and thread. It worked best if the thread was a darker color because sometimes the dye from the older threads would transfer to the eggs shell and make an even more beautiful design.
When all the eggs were covered, my mother carefully placed them into a soup pot filled with fresh water, and put the pot on the stove to hard-boil the eggs to perfection. When the hard-boiled eggs had cooled down enough to handle, we all got the job of unraveling the threads and removing the onionskins. What a thrill it was discovering all the beautiful colors the onionskins deposited onto the eggshells. There were deep shades of brown, delicate shades of green, bright shades of yellow and, if we used red skins, the most beautiful shades of pink and red. Even though we started doing this unraveling as very young children, I cannot remember anyone ever breaking an egg because we very carefully unraveled each egg. When the eggs had dried, but still were a little warm, my mother would rub soft butter onto the shell. As she finished each egg, one of us would take a soft cloth and rub the eggs until they were bright as jewels.
On Easter morning, we woke up to see baskets full of sweet treats and those beautiful onionskin dyed eggs all lined up on the buffet in our dining room. I could never understand why the neighborhood kids laughed at our onionskin dyed eggs. I never thought their eggs were as beautiful as our eggs. Usually, their eggs had drip marks and the colors were always dull compared to our bright mosaic eggs.
My great-grandmother came to America from Switzerland and she brought the tradition of dying Easter eggs with onionskins. I have no idea if other cultures dye their eggs this way. I’ve never met anyone else who even heard of it.
When I married and we celebrated our first Easter, I continued with my family tradition of using onionskins to dye the Easter eggs. At first, my husband thought it was silly because they always used food coloring, but as the years went on he started reminding me a week of so before Easter that we had to get some extra onionskins to dye the eggs.
