Easter in Egypt

Regular readers of our blog know that Egyptian Christians celebrate two Christmas and Easter Holy-days in keeping with both Western and Eastern traditions.  This weekend was the Eastern or Orthodox remembrance of Easter, and so we have pictures from this weekend's events.  The Cairo Christian Fellowship have several believers from Coptic backgrounds, and therefore we do not meet on Eastern Christmas or Easter as these believers return to family churches and gatherings.

This year, the two Easters were separated by more than 30 days.  We
celebrated an Sunrise service on the morning of western Easter, and followed that with a fellowship brunch.  Between the two Easters, we had the Heliopolis Evangelical Church choir present a specially arranged choral cantata.  Many CCF used to participate in this choir, though many can no longer due to difficulty in commuting to the practices in that part of Cairo; a few still participate, and the choir continues to be conducted by a member of the CCF.  The choir prepares to present the program in English and in Arabic each year.

The new children's program for Christian families has been spending Saturday mornings thinking about various miracles and teachings of Jesus the Christ.  We spent last Saturday thinking about Palm Sunday and Good Friday, and ladies from the CCF joined the program to teach the traditional Coptic craft of palm weaving, helping the kids (and parents) to make crosses, bracelets, donkeys and other items from the palm leaves.  This last Saturday we were prepared to celebrate the Resurrection.  And, per worldwide custom, we will held an Easter Egg hunt for the children in addition to our weekly songs and craft time.

The Monday after Eastern Easter is an Egyptian holiday known as Sham el Nissim.  Sham el Nissim is an ancient holiday, tracing its origins to Pharonic times, and literally means to "smell the breeze".  This day "officially" marks the start of summer here in Egypt, and is the acceptable time to pull out short sleeves -- though we have been in short sleeves off and on for several weeks now.  On Sham el Nissim, people gather with friends and family outside to appreciate and celebrate the beauty of nature.  As such, the Christians we serve in the Cairo Christian Fellowship have maintained a traditional gathering in the garden where we live.


They bring various foods and drinks and spend time sitting and talking together; the Coptic Christians have usually been fasting for 40 days leading up to Eastern Easter, and so Sham el Nissim also serves as a feast to break the various fasts they have been observing.  One traditional food of Sham el Nissim is "feseekh" or "stinky fish", which has been pickled.  I tried this last year because it's tradition--from the Egyptians we have interacted with, you either love or hate it--I did not love it, but I can't say if I gave it a fair try as the smell may have interfered with the effort!  This year we had even more of the feseekh on hand and the smell was quite overpowering!  This wasn't our only fish option though; we also had two types of herring served, along with several other foods.

When we first moved to Maadi and looked at the garden, we thought we should get a badminton or croquet set; we had a croquet set purchased and included in our orginal shipment, along with some birdies as there were already rackets in storage on the property.  For the first time since our move, we set out the croquet and the kids spent a lot of time playing this on one half of the garden.  The adults, meanwhile, spent time talking and enjoying the shade--but they also broke out a game of Boggle to test their vocabulary skills.

We had less families this year for Sham el Nissim as many families prefer to take the long weekend as the opportunity to go to the beach.  Ain Sokhna, along the Red Sea, is not far from Cairo, and we know several of the CCF Kids families went there; while other families may have gone to the north coast near Alexandria.

Next year, western and eastern Easter will both be on the same day and will lead to the convergence of many of these spring traditions.

Thank you for your continuing interest and support.
Continue to Pray for Egypt...