My Ukrainian Lents

 It just occurred to me -- on this last Mardi Gras eve -- that all my Lents are Ukrainian.

At least, they have been for almost as long as I can remember. It seems odd in a way: I have no family connections to Ukraine; I've met maybe one Ukrainian in my entire life; I know very little about Ukrainian culture. So why Ukrainian Lents?

It all has to do with dyeing Easter eggs. Here is the background: My father -- an atheist as only a lapsed-Irish-Creole-Catholic can be -- was also ironically enough an enthusiastic Easter egg artist from the moment that he had a family with whom to create Easter egg art. For a while he experimented with covering eggs with colorful tissue paper or string, but he finally (by my teen years) he hit upon the technique that would dominate the rest of his life, a "wax resist" technique that produces colorful, intricate Easter eggs known as pysanky.

Pysanky as we learned about them were Ukrainian. And the time to make them is Lent. If you wait until Easter, you're too late. The technique requires inscribing designs in melted wax (using a stylus) and preserving those designs in varying colors by sequential washes of dye, until finally the wax is melted off and the colorful design is revealed. The process is painstaking and time-consuming. While it's possible to complete a design in the course of an evening, it's better to stretch the process out over a few days. There are lots of places online where you can learn more and order supplies, which are pretty basic. The stylus is the only really specialized tool; the most basic kind -- a little copper cone tied with twine on the end of a stick about the size of a pencil -- has an archaic, bronze-age vibe. 

One way to think about it: there's no need to give up anything for Lent when you take up something this difficult. It also carries baggage of a sort that contributes to the weight of the season.

The baggage is a Ukrainian folk story that says everyone should do at least one pysanka a year in order to prevent the serpent that encircles the world from squeezing it tighter. I have done my at-least-one pysanka a year for quite some time now. I'm not the artist my father was; nonetheless I find quite enjoyable the lengthy process of conjuring a design, executing it, and reveling in the surprises of the "reveal." Also, doing pysanky enforces patience and encourages a deep, focused meditation on the vast themes of Easter unlike any other activity I know. I never make an egg without hoping that in some small way I'm loosening the serpent.

My Ukrainian Lent feels especially real this year.