Every year on Easter, my family used to play a game.
It involves boiling eggs until they are rock hard and then, after some light decoration (I usually go with drawing a Monopoly Man-style face on mine), lining them up against a wall outside. The participants must, from a certain distance, throw a coin at the egg with the hope of getting it stuck firmly into the flesh. Whoever manages to do so is then crowned the Easter King or Queen. It is actually much harder than it sounds, and usually quickly devolves from a whimsical game into a test of anger management and familial ties.
I first recall playing this with family friends who, like my own family, identified as Italian-South African. It was one of the many “Italianisms” of my childhood: rituals and quirks which defined the DNA of our family as belonging to a unique subset, which we proudly guarded. There were other things - compulsory attendance at a Catholic church presided over by one Father Massimo; a weekly visits to a restaurant called Spiga D’Oro, where everyone felt like relatives and the menu never changed; shopping at the only Italian deli in the city, L’edicola, for giardiniera and salumi; singing folk songs around the lunch table word-for-word, despite not being able to speak the language. As a child, I wouldn’t have hesitated to identify culturally as Italian, despite only having visited the country for two weeks at age 12, and having little-to-no relationship with the Nonna I owed my passaporto to.
But it was only recently, when discussing the Easter game with an Italian colleague, that I second-guessed its provenance. His blank stare as I manically mimed chucking a £5 coin at an imaginary egg confirmed that this was either an invention of my family’s, or a traditional game that had been preserved within the immigrant community in South Africa, but lost to the ones in the Mother Land.
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