My younger daughter and I took our basket into town for blessing.  After a bit of shifting things around, this is what our basket looked like.

The prosciutto roses were added at the very end, because they dry out so quickly – though they did double duty in holding some of the eggs in place!  I ended up fitting 8 of each type of egg into the basket, so there were some of the tea dyed and onion skin dyed eggs left over.

The embroidered table cloth is one of a couple of antique embroidered linens I’ve managed to acquire many, many years ago.  It has 8 little matching napkins.

Normally, I would have ironed it first, but neither of our two irons made it with the movers.

Which reminds me.  I have come to realize something.

We are now completely finished unpacking!

I had unpacked a box of books in the office some time ago.  I still have a number of bins, but aside from one that’s still got stuff in it because I have to find the right spot of them, they don’t need to be unpacked.  The stuff in them belongs in the bins.

On the one hand, Yay!  We’re unpacked!

On the other… there is now no possibility of finding the missing stuff jammed into an unpacked box somewhere.  That stuff is lost.

Including my two irons.

*sigh*

But I digress!

I snagged a quick photo in the church…

Another half dozen or so baskets were added after this photo was taken.

I’m taken aback by the lit candles inside people’s baskets.  I’m reading “fire hazard” all over the place!  :-D  My daughter remembers the last time we brought our baskets here for blessing, several Easters ago.  We had come out for a visit and stayed with my father, in the very house we live in now.  We had included a candle in our basket.  Someone lit it for us!

A couple of the baskets that came after this photo was taken were just huge!  You can kind of tell whose baskets are for larger families. :-D There was one that had the most interesting wire holder for the eggs, that kept them well above the rest of the food.  I love all the different styles of baskets and how they are decorated, too.

If you look towards the back of the photo, on the riser above the baskets at the foot of the alter, is a small basket that doesn’t have any food in it.  That’s a donation basket for the priest, for doing the blessing.  I remember helping my mother bring baskets for blessing, and she would set up the little donation basket, and a second one, where she added some food items from our own baskets.  Other people followed her lead and added more, so that by the end of it, the priest also had a basket full of food!

For the blessing ceremony, a prayer and blessing was said, then the priest sprinkled all the baskets with holy water.  Then he went down the aisle and sprinkled us, too.  We finished with a rousing hymn of blessing, with the priest grinning from ear to ear as he sang, his arms waving to the rhythm.  Clearly, this is a ceremony much enjoyed by the priest, as well!

Then, after we retrieved our basket, I saw him standing there with his iPhone out, taking video of us all, getting our baskets, still with that huge, joyful smile on his face.

It was awesome.

The Re-Farmer