Ah, Easter.
That sacred season of resurrection, renewal, and women quietly dissociating in their childhood kitchens while 16.4 kilograms of ham sweats under aluminium foil.
This year, in a heroic attempt to avoid repeating last year’s domestic fiasco, we made what seemed like a mature, evolved decision: we would spend Easter at my parents’ house in Prelog, together with my sister’s family.
Neutral ground, we thought. Less pressure, we thought. Someone else’s kitchen, we thought.
The kind of optimism usually reserved for people booking budget flights with a 45-minute layover.
When the Food Becomes the Main Character
As Easter approached, my PMS arrived like an uninvited spiritual consultant whose only message was: everything is wrong.
Suddenly, every tradition felt like a personal attack.
- The eggs? Aggressive.
- The bread? Emotionally loaded.
- The entire concept of festive gathering? Borderline violent.
Instead of entering the holiday spirit, I entered a psychological escape room where every sound from the kitchen signalled a fresh emergency.
And naturally, the food.
Oh, the food.
At this point, I’m convinced Balkan families don’t celebrate holidays so much as prepare for a low-level apocalypse.
There was ham, of course – the holy centrepiece, weighing a casual 16.4 kilograms, enough to feed our family, the neighbours, and several lost tourists.
But why stop there?
Why respect the elegant simplicity of Easter staples like eggs, bread, francuska, and ham when you can add janjetina and odojak, as if we’re catering both Easter and the fall of the Ottoman Empire?
I looked at the table and realised we weren’t celebrating resurrection.
We were hosting Meatstock 2026.
The Theology of Warm Eggs
And then came my favourite subplot: the eggs.
Not the symbolic eggs.
Not the lovingly dyed eggs.
No.
The boiled eggs that, according to my mother’s deeply specific food theology, were now destined for the bin because they had committed the mortal sin of becoming cold.
Apparently, in this house, eggs have a very short spiritual shelf life.
Warm = blessed.
Cold = betrayal.
So I ate mine out of principle. Not hunger. Not tradition. Activism.
Because if Easter means anything, surely it’s one woman rage-eating hard-boiled eggs in silent protest against food waste and inherited neuroses.
A House Full of Nerves
But the real feast wasn’t on the table. It was in the atmosphere. Everyone was nervous.
My mother was performing that uniquely maternal holiday ballet where she starts eight things at once, forgets seven, and then blames the nearest living relative for not being clairvoyant.
“How did nobody know I put that on the stove?”
A fascinating question, considering the pot was hidden behind three others and protected by 30 years of martyrdom.
My daughter, overwhelmed and under-slept, was one chocolate bunny away from total emotional collapse.
My husband and my little girl became the only soft places in the day – two islands of warmth in an ocean of over-prepared obligation.
And then there was my older sister. There’s something deeply healing about surviving family holidays with the one person who was raised in the same beautifully dysfunctional ecosystem.
No explanation needed.
Just one look across the table that says, Yes, this is absurd. Yes, this always happens. Yes, pass the francuska before someone weaponises it.
What Are We Actually Celebrating?
At some point, somewhere between the third serving of meat no one asked for and my mother loudly rediscovering something she forgot in the oven, I had the forbidden thought: What exactly is the point of this? What are we actually preserving?
The joy?
The connection?
The sacredness?
Because from where I was sitting, wedged between cold eggs and rising cortisol, it looked less like celebration and more like ritualised stress with decorative napkins.
We say it’s about family, but everyone’s irritable.
We say it’s about gratitude, but we’re fighting over oven space.
We say it’s tradition, but sometimes tradition just feels like emotional blackmail from dead relatives.
And maybe that’s the real Easter miracle: Every year, we resurrect the exact same chaos and then act shocked when it rises exactly as it died.
The Most Sacred Tradition Might Be Peace
So next year, we will stay home.
Alone.
And for the first time, that doesn’t sound sad.
It sounds honest.
Because maybe growing up also means realising that not every tradition deserves to survive just because it has survived.
Some things are worth keeping: the laughter, the shared looks with your sister, your child’s sleepy smile, coffee in peace, a breakfast that doesn’t require military logistics.
The rest?
The panic, the performance, the compulsory joy, the emotional exhaustion disguised as family closeness? Maybe that can stay behind.
Maybe the holiest thing we can do is stop recreating rituals that leave everyone depleted.
Maybe love doesn’t need 16 kilos of ham, three species of meat, and one nervous breakdown to prove itself.
Maybe the point of holidays was never perfection.
Maybe it was presence.
And maybe peace, chosen deliberately, is the most sacred tradition of all.
Erika Matic writes about family chaos, inherited absurdities, and the quiet rebellion of choosing peace over performance. Somewhere between tradition, sarcasm, and existential honesty, she is learning that love doesn’t need to be loud to be real – sometimes it just needs coffee, fewer people, and eggs that are allowed to be cold.
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