Easter eggs as you know them in the UK, a chocolate egg with not much inside is quite nice, but very different from what I am used to from home.
In Sweden we give (and receive) cardboard Easter eggs with beautiful prints, filled with lots of mixed sweets including chewy dragé eggs that to me is a must!
When I was little my mother even painted Easter Eggs for the whole family and we use them every year. I have one really big pink one with my name on it, and another purple one that my granny made. Dad still wants his sweets in his childhood egg which is so huge it would take about 5 kg of sweets to fill it up, so normally we put some tissue paper in the bottom and fill up the rest so he doesn’t get more sweets than us.
On Saturday my friend Gaby mentioned (while looking at English Easter eggs) that her Swedish au pair used to give the children the paper version with all the sweets inside and I realised it is quite different to the British tradition.
I think this is partly because chocolate is so popular here. I mean, at home people eat a lot of chocolate too, and I prefer Marabou to Cadbury’s, but here people eat even more. But then again, we eat huge quantities of pick ‘n mix in Sweden and you don’t here, and that is probably because Sweden is better at producing nice chewy sweets. We even have different Haribo sweets in Sweden (although the brand is Danish) because what is on sale here just wouldn’t sell well in Sweden. Funny that.
I don’t actually know where/if you can buy the cardboard eggs here, but if you see them you should try our tradition too. One can’t have too many sweets, right?!