Easter
by Mélanie GERME
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The Catholic Church commemorates the resurrection of Jesus-Christ at Easter. Easter falls on the first Sunday after the full moon around March - April. I would like to introduce you to the Easter tradition in Martinique by sharing my own experience.
Camping
I camped at Cap-Macré, a beach near Marin, eleven years ago with my family and our friends for four days. Camping began on Good Friday and finished on Easter Monday.
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While we were camping, my cousins and I would stay in the water all morning, play and have races. Afterwards, we would eat and two children would do the washing up. They would rub a bit of sand against the plates, then wash them with salt water and finally rinse them with drinking water. In the afternoon, we would play pétanque. It is a game where you try to hit the cochonnet, a small white ball, with heavy metal balls around size of your palm. We would also hunt crabs to play with. At night , we youngsters would sit on the sand and tell each other horror stories. Sometimes, the children would be terrified and cry. I would sleep in a tent with my cousin and we would go to bed late at night, after everybody else. We would share secrets and talk about the day we had spent together. In short, we took advantage of our night under the stars by the sea.
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The adults would wake up just before us, which would not normally happen very often! During the morning, they would play dominoes and swim, but less than children. By the afternoon, it would be time for a nap, so nobody would stir! At night, they would talk over their ti-punch, the local rum punch, and gossip for a while.
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Good Friday
Good Friday corresponds to Friday of the Holy Week, the anniversary of the death of Jesus-Christ. On that day, I walked the 'Holy Path', where there are fourteen sites representing the passion of Christ, one after the other. I would thank the Lord and remain for five or ten minutes, praying in front of each chapel. On our way back, we came across a beach called Anse Grosse Roche (Large Rock Bay) which is quite remote, so we took advantage of it and had a swim before returning to the camping ground.
Easter Monday
On Easter Monday we freed our crabs in the park. We had caught them two months earlier in order to watch over what they ate. We then used about a hundred of them to make Matoutou de crabes with rice, the traditional Easter Monday dish.
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