![]() “Though it looks a bit unappetising, it tastes delicious and children love it, especially served with cream and sugar,” says Karimäki. Mämmi was traditionally served in birch bark trays, but is now available in food stores round the country every spring in prepacked in cardboard cartons. Mämmi is a sludgy-looking dark brown pudding made of malt and rye flour (see below for a link to Finnish Easter recipes). Two seasonal local desserts are also widely enjoyed. Roast lamb is the most common main course for a Finnish Easter Sunday family dinner. “Pasha” is a creamy-coloured pudding, sometimes made in a mould decorated with religious motifs. Easter eggs and Easter bunnies – both pre-Christian symbols of fertility – also abound in Finland, though these are more recent cultural imports. Karimäki adds that, as Easter approaches, Finnish children also plant grass seeds in shallow dishes of soil and place birch twigs in vases of water, and watch eagerly for green shoots and “mouse-ear” buds to appear symbolising the springtime reawakening of life. To this day, the little witches are more likely to roam on Easter Saturday in western Finland, but on Palm Sunday in other regions. “This Finnish children’s custom interestingly mixes two older traditions – a Russian Orthodox ritual where birch twigs originally represented the palms laid down when Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and a Swedish and Western Finnish tradition in which children made fun of earlier fears that evil witches could be about on Easter Saturday,” explains Karimäki. The witches recite a traditional rhyme at the door: Virvon, varvon, tuoreeks terveeks, tulevaks vuodeks vitsa sulle, palkka mulle! (In translation: I wave a twig for a fresh and healthy year ahead a twig for you, a treat for me!) Photo: VilleMisaki/flickr, cc by-nc-nd 2.0 Willow twigs like this are cut and decorated by kids to give as gifts when they go door to door as Easter witches. ![]()
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