Easter is as much family time as Christmas in Finland. It normally starts on Palm Sunday when little wizards (kids of the neighborhood) come knocking on your door and say ‘Virvon, varvon, tuoreeks, terveeks, tulevaks vuodeks, sulle vitsa, mulle palkka’. Then you have to give them some chocolate eggs, candy or money. This tradition happens later, on Easter Saturday, on the west coast of Finland and on the islands, where they also have Easter fires. When I was a kid in Jyväskylä, in central Finland, we also dressed up as wizards on Saturday.A terrible flu made me change the menu at our traditional family dinner at Good Friday. We normally serve lamb with mint jelly and garlic potatoes and a Russian style pasha made with quark.
To make the 11-persons dinner as easy as possible, we had a simple shrimp cocktail with avocado as a starter. For the main course we bought two large cans Confit de Canard each having 12 duck legs cooked in duck fat, 2 kgs frozen Jerusalem artichoke puree (to be thickened with cream), frozen cranberry and one liter good red wine sauce. We warmed the cans first in hot water to make the fat melt. As the meat is overripe the legs break apart easily. To pick them from the large cans was greasy and messy. However, we managed to get most of the legs in one piece on a pan and put them in the oven for 20 minutes in 200 degrees. They were tasty and served the purpose. 
I had started the preparations for the dessert, lemon tiramisu, before the flu hit me by making home-made lemon curd, which is the most important ingredient for this tiramisu. I chose the micro-wave recipe, and it was great! As so often, the dessert was the best part of the meal. 
Anyway, the most important part of the dinner was to have the family together. My two-months-old grand-daughter, still nameless, was present for the first time and moving from lap to lap. After dinner, we played Alias game until midnight and laughed a lot.On Saturday, as there were three young men with us on the island as well as many kids eager to help and some women who needed exercise, we started logging and making firewood. We need wood for the beach sauna, fire places and outside bath tub. Simo and Hank used the chain saw and logged some birches, aspen and pine trees.
Because there were big piles of smaller branches and twigs after the firewood had been chopped, we made a big fire on the field and burned them the whole evening. Late at the sunset, we also grilled some sausages in the embers, and the kids loved that.
Everybody was exhausted after all that physical exercise and being outside the whole day. Hot beach sauna was a great way to end that day. Normally we use the beach sauna from midsummer until September and the electric sauna in the winter time, but it was great to have the wood-fired beach sauna already at Easter.My flu got better and the weather turned warmer and sunnier towards the end of the Easter, and on Monday it was already +8 degrees. We saw the hepaticas blossom when we headed back to town.
