Cadbury Without Borders

An Iranian friend and I were chatting yesterday about where to go on one of our weekly lunch dates. As often happens, the conversation veered from a description of a traditional English Sunday Roast to one of our own respective traditions. As it turns out, the Persian New Year, or Norouz, begins next week.

My friend tried to describe the festive table setting Iranians have to celebrate the new year. It's called haft sin, where sin is a letter of the Persian alphabet (س). Seven foods are placed on the table, each starting with the letter sin, and each carrying its own symbolic meaning.

We were sitting in the school's computer lab, so we clicked over to Wikipedia for a full list. (It's not very easy to describe your own traditions without visuals. Last season this same friend asked me why we decorate Christmas trees and I could only quote Jim Gaffigan.) Sure enough, there was a list of seven foods - sabzeh (wheat or barley), sib (apples), senjed (oleaster), somaq (sumac), sir (garlic), samanu (a sweet pudding), and serkeh (vinegar).

"That's so funny," I said. "That sounds a lot like something we do in Italy, where we eat seven fishes for Christmas."

"Sometimes you have other things," she added. "Not just those seven." She pulled up one of the many photos of various haft sin spreads.

Haft sin spread, by Mandana Asani

"That's lovely!" I said.

"But . . . Wait a minute."

Peering closer.

"Is that . . .?"

"Um, those look like Easter eggs," I told her.

They are clearly not Easter eggs, of course. But, at the same time, they are. Hard-boiled eggs, decorated and painted, although in Iran you place them on the table where in America we hide them and make small children go hunt for them.

So we reminisced together for a while about decorating eggs. It was all well and good, of course, until she asked me about Easter.

"Um . . ." I said. Where to begin - the high religious significance, or . . . "We celebrate with . . . the Easter . . . bunny? Who lays . . . chocolate?

"Shoot, we're going to need a visual."