🐣 Native English Conversation: British Easter

Hello and welcome to The English Like a Native Podcast, the listening

resource for intermediate to advanced-level English learners.

My name is Anna and today I'm joined by Nick and we are going to be discussing

something that is coming up that we celebrate every year and that is Easter.

Now, Easter for many people in the UK is a religious holiday, but like

with many of the religious holidays, it has been taken over, in many

respects, by the big commercial bodies.

So, in every shop from Christmas, all the way up until Easter, you'll find

the shelves littered with things like chocolate eggs and Easter bonnet making

crafty bits and bobs, and baskets in order to do your Easter hunts.

And so there's a whole range of things that happen around this holiday that can

be celebrated by everyone regardless of whether they are Catholic or Christian or

mark this as a religious festival or not.

So Nick and I are not religious.

And we do partake in Easter festivities.

So that's what we're going to dive into today.

Hi, Nick.

Are you excited about the Easter holidays?

I am egg-cited, definitely.

Egg-cited.

Yeah.

Excuse the pun, I love Easter.

I think it's brilliant.

I grew up a Catholic, did you know?

Yes.

I went to a convent school.

Yes, with all the nuns.

With all the nuns and their rulers.

So what was Easter like when you were at school?

It must have been quite an important time of the year.

It was definitely an important time of the year and I think they did a

good job in balancing the religious and chocolate elements of it.

The school had quite a big green area with trees and things in.

And I remember very fondly going out and searching for Easter eggs with the nuns.

Okay.

So there's a few little symbols that we associate with Easter, eggs being

one of them because Easter is all about the resurrection and redemption

and fresh starts and new beginnings.

It also comes in spring, so it's when new life is literally all

around us with the bulbs coming up.

Not the bulbs, the buds!

Yeah, the bulbs don't come up.

The bulbs go into the ground and they produce buds.

So the buds are coming up.

The flowers are just starting to emerge.

In the fields, as you drive through the countryside, you see

beautiful little lambs leaping for joy having just been born.

I mean, not just been born, but a few weeks old.

And there's this sense of new and fresh everywhere.

So these eggs are really the core symbol of Easter.

And of course they've been made into confectionery.

And we just find chocolate eggs everywhere, don't we?

But these chocolate eggs are not delivered by a huge, colourful

chicken, which you would expect.

These chocolate eggs are delivered mostly by another symbol of Easter, which is...?

The Easter bunny.

Yes.

Isn't that odd?

Yeah, I don't know the origins.

I guess it's about spring and rebirth?

Well, this is where Christianity has taken some bits from other religions.

There's kind of a mix of different things that have come in and merged

with Christian festivals so...

Sounds like you've done your research.

I have done a little bit of research, yes.

And I'm just trying to find the name of the goddess.

Apparently, one of the origins is an Anglo-Saxon goddess called Eostre.

Eostre.

I think I'm pronouncing that correctly.

She was the goddess of spring and fertility, and she's often depicted

with, or as, or with, hares which are very similar to rabbits, aren't they?

They have longer feet, longer ears.

Is the Easter bunny a rabbit or a hare?

As with everything, our entire language, everything, we've taken little bits from

different places and put it all together in this big melting pot and produced

a bunny that delivers chocolate eggs.

Sounds confusing to me.

Did you ever do the decorating of eggs?

So where you literally get an egg from a chicken and blow out the

insides through tiny little pinholes.

And so then you just have the eggshell in its perfect form and then you'd

paint it to be really, really beautiful.

Did you ever do that?

I did, but I haven't thought about it for probably a decade.

So I've just reminded you.

Yeah.

So maybe we should do that with our kids this year.

Maybe.

It sounds like quite a lot of effort.

No, you put a pinhole in the top and a pinhole in the bottom and

you blow really hard to get the insides out and then you paint it.

I don't know why you can't just paint it as is, but maybe it's less of a

risk once you've got the insides out.

Letting the kids play with eggs might be a bit of a risk otherwise.

So the other thing that you mentioned that we do around

Easter is the big Easter hunt.

Mmm, yeah, my favourite.

I love an Easter egg hunt.

So how did you do Easter egg hunts when you were a child?

Well, the Easter bunny would leave lots of eggs all over the place and

then we would run around just trying to find them haphazardly, I think,

which as a parent now feels like a difficult conundrum to try and solve.

How do I go and hide all the eggs?

How do I make sure the children can find them all?

How do I make sure I remember where I put them all?

Yeah, because you don't want to get to the middle of a hot summer's day and go

and plonk yourself down somewhere and realise you sat on an old chocolate egg.

Yeah!

Now Easter hunts for me were very different.

My mum would put in a lot of effort - I mean, sorry, the Easter

bunny - would put in a lot of effort and create a series of clues.

And these clues would give you an idea of where the next location

was, where you'd find the next clue.

So clue number one would say something like, I'm hot and dry and I get

your clothes to the same state or something along those lines, some

sort of semi-cryptic, but relatively easy, because I was a child, clue.

And I'd say,

"Oh, that must be the tumble dryer."

And you go to the tumble dryer and there would be clue number

two and you keep going along.

And at some point there would be a little chocolate egg alongside another

clue and you'd go all over the house following clue after clue after clue

and then maybe by clue eight or nine you would discover your big egg, your prize

egg that you would wolf down in one go.

So I actually enjoyed that experience much more than just haphazardly running around

the garden, trying to find random eggs.

Yeah.

I think with us, it was more like, open the doors, let out all the

kids, and just "fly my pretties, go and fly, go and find the eggs".

I like your idea of doing clues.

I think that's a good one.

Yeah, put your mind into action.

It's a lot of effort as the Easter bunny, but I do think it's

more interesting for the kids.

And you get out what you put in.

Absolutely.

So you get to enjoy the journey of the children as well.

Absolutely.

So what other things are associated with Easter?

I always think of daffodils.

Easter is usually the time when there's lots of daffodils that

you can buy at the supermarket and have daffodils around your house.

And everywhere you look, they just spring up everywhere.

They're quite hardy little flowers, aren't they?

Yeah, daffodils seem like they survive year after year.

I do love a daffodil.

That's just that lovely splash of yellow in the garden.

I love a tulip.

Two years ago, I planted loads and loads of daffodil bulbs into the garden in order

to see them come up the following spring.

But then by the autumn, you went out, dug them all up, not realising what they were,

just thinking, well, I'll just get rid of these, to put some tulips in instead.

Do you remember that?

Yeah, I did.

I'm very sorry about that.

But the tulips are delightful.

They are.

They are.

The other thing that I think about with Easter is hot cross buns.

Hmm.

I didn't realise that hot cross buns were an Easter thing.

Is the cross on a hot cross bun related to the cross that Jesus was on?

I have absolutely no idea.

But they've become so popular, you can get them any time of the year, can't you?

Yeah, all year round, hot cross buns.

If they weren't so bad for you, I would literally have them every single day.

So you cut them in half, you stick them in the toaster or under the grill, and

you make them nice and crispy and warm, and then all the kind of spices that are

in them just activate, and you can smell it all over the house, and then you put

on a little knob of butter, and let the butter melt on the hot hot cross bun.

On the hot hot cross bun.

And it's delightful with a cup of tea Don't you think?

It does go well with a cup of tea.

Do you know, I don't think I've ever bought myself a packet of hot cross buns.

And I also don't think I've ever eaten as many hot cross buns in my life

as I have done since I've known you.

Well, I haven't bought any this year so far, but now I'm talking about

them, I think we must at least have one hot cross bun this Easter season.

So daffodils, bunnies, chocolate eggs, hot cross buns.

The other thing that I associate with Easter is the Easter bonnet competition.

I was the proud winner of the Easter bonnet competition one year at my

school and it made me so happy.

Did you ever do an Easter bonnet competition?

I don't even know what they are now.

Basically you take a bonnet, which is like a quite an old-fashioned

word for hat, like a wide brimmed hat, and you decorate it for Easter.

So I think in the one that I won, I put a nest on top of my bonnet and filled

it with chicks and, not real chicks, but pretend chicks and painted eggs.

I did the blow thing.

And then I put other symbols of Easter all around the bonnet and decorated

it with ribbon and it was very fancy.

So I'm not surprised that I won, but I find all that kind of crafty

element to Easter really great fun.

It's a nice way to get kids involved in doing something that doesn't require

a screen, you know, being crafty and decorating and things like that.

I really think Easter is a very crafty holiday, isn't it?

I think Easter is about crafts

And family.

And yeah, and family.

Halloween is about dressing up, and Christmas is a

hundred percent about family.

I thought you were going to say food then!

It's about food.

Well, I mean, family and food are basically two sides

of the same coin, right?

Yeah.

So normally over the Easter holiday, the Easter weekend is

usually a four-day weekend, right?

So you have the Friday off, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday off.

So Easter weekend is usually a time where people will travel and go away and

make the most of that four-day holiday, whether that's a staycation or some

people use that four days to go and take a week off without having to take too

many actual days holiday from work right?

We're not going away, are we?

No not this year.

But we have our children off school, so we have to find

things to go and do with them.

I mean, I'm quite looking forward to this Easter holidays because it

means we're going to have to spend lots of time with our children.

And hopefully the weather in the UK will have finally turned

and it will stop being so cold.

So I'm really looking forward to bright blue skies.

Hot cross buns.

Hot cross buns.

An Easter bonnet.

And crafty activities.

And of course, chocolate eggs.

Before we finish, how do you eat your Easter egg?

I like a dark chocolate Easter egg.

Do you eat it all in one sitting?

It depends how big it is really.

I'm very much a nibbler.

I like to make things last as long as possible.

I used to put the chocolate in my mouth and let it melt so I could

feel it all over my mouth, which now I know is terrible for my teeth.

But when I was a child I used to like to make things last

as long as I possibly could.

Yeah, I tend to just kind of wolf things down really.

Well, this year, I think we will buy chocolate eggs for the kids,

but I think we'll be good apart from our hot cross buns, which I

think we can go a bit crazy on.

Maybe have two, two each.

Okay.

That was egg-cellent.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining me on this egg-tra special podcast all about Easter.

I feel like there should have been more Easter 'yolks' involved.

Oh, Easter 'yolks'!

Very good!

I can't think of any comebacks.

So listeners, I thank you for letting us tickle your eardrums.

I do hope you enjoy your Easter holiday if you celebrate, and

if not, have a pleasant weekend.

I look forward to tickling your eardrums again very soon.

Until then, take very good care and goodbye.