An Egg More Than an Egg

My favourite Easter egg is one I found when I was around twelve. 

It was painted in Prussian blue and a dark ink green, in watercolour, so the colour sat lightly and you could still see the grain of the shell beneath it. In black pen, someone had drawn two small scenes: a basket of fish and loaves on one side, and on the other, a fisherman in his boat. I’ve found plenty over the years, but that’s the one I think of first. I remember thinking that my dad really outdid himself that year ( I had learnt by then that the Easter Bunny outsourced).

And that delight is something children have felt for centuries. Because an egg can be more than an egg — it can carry stories, miracles, mischief. And it always has. Queen Victoria noted in her journal in 1848 that “the children hunted for Easter eggs, it being Maundy Thursday, & they were in the greatest delight.” Long before that, Martin Luther organized hunts for his congregation, with men hiding eggs for women and children to find. Across eras and continents, the delight has been the same: artistry and surprise, pagan and Christian lore and ritual intertwined, discovery folded into something small enough to fit in your hand.

Which is why the eggs themselves — their colors, their patterns, their clever disguises — deserve their own mention. In medieval Europe, eggs were dyed with natural pigments: onion skins producing a translucent amber, beetroot yielding deep crimson, and walnut shells lending a dusky brown. In Slavic lands, the tradition of pysanky developed into a highly codified art form, each wax‑etched line carrying symbolic meaning — protection, fertility, prosperity. In Greece, eggs were dyed a brilliant red and cracked together in games of resurrection. 

By the nineteenth century, the artistry had shifted into chocolate, with confectioners across France and Germany competing to transform the egg into edible sculpture. Joanne Harris, in Chocolat, beautifully describes how “the French ones were works of art; wrapped in transparent Cellophane, allowing their natural gloss to shine through, tied with artfully‑curled ribbons and decorated with clusters of flowers and fruit, cleverly piped on in icing‑sugar. Others were made of brightly‑coloured papier‑mâché, painted with traditional designs and filled with tiny chocolate shapes. Some were small enough to be sold at pocket‑money prices; others were set pieces large enough to qualify as sculpture, each confectioner vying with his rivals to create bigger, better, more beautiful pieces.” 

French shop have little brochures featuring old‑fashioned drawings of their chocolate.

Our version was humbler, but no less inventive. Long before I was born, egg hunts were held in the garden of our house in Alwarpet, Madras. My grandfather would boil the eggs, wrap them in green kite paper, and hide them in the garden. He was helped by my grand-uncle, who was apparently something of a trickster. I remember being told that he once hollowed out a green coconut husk and hid an egg inside it. I wish I’d been there for that one.

By the time I was about 5, the egg hunt was already a given in Kodai. We’d return home from Easter Sunday mass and my  younger sister and I would be told to sit in our rooms and not look out at the garden so as to not disturb the Easter Bunny. We took that very seriously. Then, the front room doors would be opened and we’d run out and around the house, peering under flowers and behind the bushes. The obvious ones went first. After that, you had to slow down and start again.

To this day, that tradition is the reason I’m drawn to rabbits and eggs in lore and literature — from Fabergé’s jeweled creations to the hidden “Easter eggs” in films and games. The Fabergé eggs, of course, were commissioned as Easter gifts for the Russian imperial family, beginning with Tsar Alexander III’s order in 1885.  Each egg was made in secrecy over the course of about a year and unique in design, often tied to an event in the imperial household and built around a surprise - which feels excessive until you see them. The “Trans‑Siberian Railway Egg” for example contained a working miniature train; the “Peacock Egg” held a mechanical bird that spread its tail; the “Hen Egg” complete with a golden yolk and miniature hen inside.

That hidden detail is why I pop‑culture Easter eggs too — the sly cameo, the coded nod, the secret level that reveals itself like a reward for curiosity. In Men in Black (1997), for instance, the aliens’ language is Huttese, the tongue of Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars.  The pattern is always the same: someone hides, someone finds.

And back in Kodai, that pattern continues. My sister and I are now the ones who decorate the eggs with our own style -  with beads and bright polka dots, color-blocked and dyed, and some silly ones too - keeping this long-held tradition alive.