Sunday, April 10

On the Sunday before Easter Finnish children – usually girls – dress up as witches and go from door to door chanting a traditional verse and waiting expectantly for candy.

This requires preparation by both parties. To qualify for the candy the children need to have carefully decorated twigs with feathers and ribbons. To actually get the candy the lucky recipients of the twigs have to have planned ahead and laid in a stock of chocolate eggs or rabbits.

Everything went well, and we now have a small bunch of artfully decorated sticks and less chocolates in the bowl than we started out with.

I will learn later that Swedish speaking children do this a week later. Some cunning bilingual children may get away with doing it twice then.