Linda Civitello

Easter is a combination of Jewish, pagan, and Christian rituals.

Its name comes from the Jewish Passover, Pesach in Hebrew.

In Italian, it is Pasqua; in French, Pâque; in Spanish, Pascua; in Swedish, Påsk; in Russian, Paskha.

In English, Easter gets its name from Eostre, the Old English goddess of fertility and dawn.

They were in special egg breads like Ukrainian paska or Russian saffron-scented kulich.

In the Mediterranean, it is lamb; in Northern Europe, ham; in England, beef.

Sometimes the bread is decorated with dyed hard-boiled eggs or shaped into a cross.

Linen saturated with a mixture of wine and salt dried hard as a board.1 However, the Church’s problem wasn’t beer-drinking barbarians but wine-drunk priests and monks who made spectacles of themselves.

Attempts to control them weren’t very successful, even though public drunkenness was against the law.

Drunkenness was part of gluttony—eating or drinking to excess.