Meaning, Eggs, and Water

Not being of Polish descent or living in a heavily Polish-American community, I never heard of Dyngus Day until recently. Boys throw water on girls in this Easter Monday custom, said to commemorate the baptism of the first King of Poland in the year 966. By some accounts girls used to give boys colored eggs to get them to stop.

Eggs feature in many spring holiday traditions—not just coloring, rolling, and hiding them but dancing around them while trying not to break any. Festivities at a royal wedding on Easter Monday 1498 included egg dancing, also attested in later paintings and poems. Early Christians called the egg a symbol of resurrection and rebirth.

Ideas of resurrection and baptism aren’t inherent in eggs or water, nor is the older fertility symbolism that’s easy to see in these traditions. The meanings of objects lie not in the objects but in us. To get to anything about Easter eggs that didn’t start in human minds, you have to go back to the hens who started laying again in springtime after an eggless winter.

​We humans make meaning all the time. Meaning and symbols are integral to how we think, speak, and write. It’s my belief individuals and cultures don’t find meaning, we create it. One meaning may be more creative or satisfying than another but it’s not more true or false. That’s not to say life is meaningless, a cause for despair. It’s rather to say life is as rich in meaning as we choose to make it.