Easter Manners: Appreciate the art of the egg.

Lithuania, like many Eastern European countries, has a deep tradition of decorating exquisite Easter Eggs. The eggs are called "Margučiai." Typically, a person first colors the eggs using natural dyes and bee's wax. Perhaps the most primal way to dye the eggs is to color them in a broth steeped from onion skins.

When I was growing up in Suburban Chicago, struggling to blend in with the American kids, I had no interest in learning how to produce these beautiful eggs. This was somewhat unusual because I generally found all crafts quite entertaining.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for Margučiai, my Dad tried to preserve the Easter custom. Dad wasn't very good at using bee's wax on the onion-skin dyed eggs, so he instead carved designs onto the colored shells with a pen knife.

Dad created one egg for me each Easter. He inscribed the egg with date, year, and the words "Linskmų Šv. Velykų" ("Happy Holy Easter"). By the time I was in my later twenties, I had a collection of over sixteen or so of these eggs.

Not long after my Dad died, burglars broke into my childhood home. While rummaging through my room, they found a couple of egg cartons containing the eggs that Dad had decorated. The burglars must have thought that the eggs were hiding places for jewelry or money. They threw the eggs, one by one, onto the wooden floor next to my bed.

They found nothing. But one egg did survive the break-in:

Verona, Wisconsin, March 2012. Here's the egg, from 1981, that made it through the burglary.