Easter Around The World

In the U.S. and most of Canada, Easter is a children's holiday in which a magical rabbit or hare comes and leases colorful Easter gift baskets filled with candies and colored eggs resting on a bed of greens. For followers of Christianity, it is also a sacred celebration of the resurrection of the faith's recognized founder, Yeshua ben-Yosef, or Iesus Christos as he was named in Greek.

This time of year - at least in the northern hemisphere - has always had special meaning across many cultures, however, celebrating the end of winter and the renewal of life. Although much of the West as well as Japan celebrate the Easter holiday, not all cultures celebrate with Easter baskets. In fact, every ethnic group and nation has colored this holiday with their own customs and traditions.

Mexico is a strongly Roman Catholic country, yet many of the church holiday customs have been influenced by the Aztec, Mayan and Olmec peoples who lived there before the arrival of the Spaniards. Like many other places, eggs figure prominently in the celebration, but instead of being eaten, children actually break them over each other's heads during the week leading up to Carnivale and the forty day Lenten season leading up to Easter. (These are really toy eggs made from papier-mâché and filled with tiny bits of paper.)

In Russia, Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Serbia where the Eastern Orthodox predominates, the coloring of Easter eggs is a highly developed art. Known as pysanka, Easter eggs are carefully painted with complex and elaborate geometric designs in bright, contrasting lights and dark colors. In the Russian church especially, Easter is the most important holiday of the liturgical year, symbolizing spiritual cleansing and renewal.

In Greece, the traditional meal is roast lamb. While this suggests a connection with the Jewish holiday of Pesach, or Passover (the Greek expression for "Happy Easter" is Kalo Pascha), it also represents the "Lamb of God." The traditional Greek Easter greeting is Hristos anesti ("Christ is Risen"), to which the response is Alithos anesti("He is risen indeed"). At midnight, Easter Sunday morning, it is also customary to light fireworks.

Christianity is practiced by less than 2% of all Japanese, however the faith has persisted in that country since the 1540's. Forced underground for 200 years by the Tokugawa shogunate, Japanese Christianity re-emerged in 1865 in the Urukami district of Nagasaki when a French priest opened a church for foreigners living in that city. Although for most Japanese Easter is time to eat candy, the faithful who attend mass at the Urakami cathedral on Easter Sunday receive actual hard-boiled chicken eggs as a symbol of rebirth. Interestingly, women in the congregation wear Portuguese mantilla lace veils in the same way as the earliest converts did over 450 years ago.

A Green Christmas

Christmas is not usually what one thinks of when thinking Green. This year let's green up our holidays. There are many ways we can reduce our energy consumption and reduce waste during this time of year.

1. Switch from traditional Christmas lights to L.E.D. Lights. They will reduce your energy consumption greatly, the average string of 50 lights uses 300 watts of energy, the same 50 set of LED lights only uses 4 watts of energy and last up to 100,000 hours.

Talk about savings! Not only are we saving a huge amount of energy, we are also keeping precious dollars in our bank accounts.

2. Put all your lights on timers. By putting all your lights on timers (inside and out), you will save energy by controlling the amount of hours your lights are on.

I don't know about you, but I've fallen asleep with the lights on many times!

3. Decorate using nature. Try decorating your home using natural items. Pinecones and fresh greens make a beautiful centerpiece for a table or swag for the mantle. Adding pinecones or holly berries to your Christmas tree will give it an elegant, natural touch. White Pine Roping is made from the trimming of the trees and is a great way to decorate the outside. It can also be mulched or composted after the season is over.

4. Try buying gifts that will actually get used for more than a week or two. Books, movies, actual toys like soccer balls or roller skates, toys that use kid power. Buying all that plastic crap that the kids see on TV is just like throwing money down the drain, and polluting our environment. Buy them art supplies that will foster their creativity or a musical instrument. Earthopoly [http://www.greennationgardens.com/Earthopoly-Eco-Friendly-Board-Game-p/eg-earthopoly.htm] is a fun board game that teaches about the environment and sustainability and it is 100% green! We are so caught up in giving our kids what the marketing companies tell us will make them happy. The toy of the month is not going to make them happy. It may satisfy them for a week or two, but not more than that.

Help them to find their passion, something they will love and grow with.

5. Don't waste food. The holidays are the biggest eating time of the year. We cook more, we bake like crazy, we basically overindulge. This means that much food gets wasted. Make sure any and all food scraps go into the compost, not the trash can! Freeze or share what you cannot eat yourselves. If you have an abundance of leftovers, take it to your local homeless shelter, a shut in neighbor, or maybe invite someone less fortunate to share your meal. Cookies, cakes and pies given to a shelter or nursing home would be greatly appreciated.

6. When setting your holiday table, go ahead and use the good china! If you have them, cloth napkins are the way to go. It makes the table look beautiful, sophisticated and it saves waste from entering our landfills. Paper napkins, plastic ware and plastic or paper plates is a huge tax on our landfills and they take a lot of energy and trees to make. If you are going to use paper napkins and plates, please do not throw them into the trashcan! Paper napkins and paper plates can be easily composted with your kitchen scraps. This will make clean up a breeze.

6. Use eco friendly wrappings. Use recycled gift bags, Comics, decorate brown paper bags for wrapping paper. At the very least do not throw your wrapping paper into the trash! Wrapping paper can be recycled just like any other paper.

7. Make lists and condense your shopping trips as much as possible, or better yet, do your shopping online. This will save lots of $$ on fuel and also keep your life simpler and less aggravating.

These are easy tips anyone can implement to Green up your Christmas.

Simple Tips For Cooking With Kids

Even at a young age, children can become quite taken with the idea of cooking. This interest is often heightened by all the cute kitchen toys they play with, along with their ability to imagine just about anything.

You can find a wide array of pint sized kitchens in the toy store, featuring replicas of common kitchen tools and ingredients. All the kitchen basics can be found, ranging from skillets and saucepans to butter, milk and eggs. Make belief cooking makes it a snap for curious kids to have fun in their own miniature kitchens.

The easiest way for kids to get cooking is to start with an Easy Bake oven. For some time now kids have been preparing delicious goodies all by themselves, without having to ask Mom to turn on the oven.

Helping out with dinner preparations can be more fun than work for a kid. Quite often, cooking becomes more of a pleasure for the parent with the help of a little one. There is no shortage of ways to help out, and if you're baking goodies your child will always be happy to lick the spoon.

Lots of kids like to play around in the kitchen occasionally. Yet there are some who seem to have a natural affinity for cooking at a young age, well beyond the ability to sprinkle colored sugar on top of iced cookies.

You can make cooking simple and fun for these future chefs. Frequently, they want to create an entire meal, not only the dessert. They might find that taking up cooking is even more enjoyable than playing computer games or watching TV.

Why not have your child decide what's for dinner that night, and help him along in the preparation. There are a lot of cookbooks and instructional videos available today that are targeted to kids, and they're loaded with simple, fun recipes. Don't be surprised if you find that many of these yummy recipes are actually quite good for you.

It's so important that you monitor your children carefully in the kitchen as they help out. You'll want something sturdier than a kitchen chair when your child wants to reach the countertop, such as a stepping stool. When something goes in or out of the oven, a grownup needs to be the one handling it, along with anything being tended on the stovetop.

Your kids need to be taught about the dangers that can be encountered in the kitchen. Teach them safety precautions to keep them from being injured, but they also need to know what to do when an accident does happen. You can't be too cautious when it comes to kids' safety in the kitchen.