Easter Monday tradition of whipping girls into health? No thanks

Getting drenched in ice cold water in Slovakia is meant to symbolise youth and make women healthy for spring but this treasured tradition has its sceptics

Some people hide Easter eggs on Easter Sunday. I used to hide water guns.

Yet no matter how hard I tried, on Easter Monday I would often wake up drenched in ice cold water as my brothers stood over me grinning. Seconds later, I would hear my mom shrieking from the other end of the apartment. My dad, water gun or bucket in hand, would just laugh as she proceeded to reprimand him about wet mattresses that would now take forever to dry.

The men in my family took their Easter traditions seriously, and dousing women in water on Easter Monday is one of Slovakia’s most treasured traditions. In some cases, after they are splashed with water, women are also whipped with a whip braided from thin branches of a willow. All in the name of tradition that is meant to symbolize youth, strength and make women healthy for the upcoming spring season.

Similar traditions are observed in other Eastern European countries like Hungary, Poland and Czech Republic.

Think of it like trick-or-treating, with the trick being that the women who answer the door must get drenched. As a reward, women are then to give the men dyed hard-boiled eggs, tie a ribbon around their whip and invite them in for a some food and a shot of vodka.

In some cases, men can also be awarded with coins – equivalent of a dime or a quarter.

“You don’t give money to the adults, just little kids,” my mother told me over the phone as she was running errands, dry and unwhipped, in Pennsylvania. “The coins are symbolic, something for their piggy bank.”

Splash and whip enough women in one day and your piggy bank could gain as much as $10 to $15.

My mother grew up in a small village. As a girl, she was often dragged into the yard and doused with buckets of water or dumped into a full bathtub of water.

One year, while visiting my cousins in the same village, I watched with horror as she stood in the yard and got sprayed with a hose. She didn’t even bother to change out of her wet clothes seeing that half an hour later, another group of boys stopped by and poured another two buckets of water over her head.

To say that I hated Easter Monday as a child would be an understatement. One Easter Monday, I spent the whole day hidden under my neighbor’s bed. Curled up with a book, I heard boys come and go, spraying her and her sisters with water. Because we lived in the city, there were no buckets involved. Instead, boys either used small water guns, spray bottles or bottles of cheap cologne.

Typically, the boys visit the home of the girls they like or have a crush on, my mom told me.

“Women hate Easter, men love it. But on the other hand, women brag the following day about the number of visits they had,” ethnographer Zuzana Beňušková told the Slovak Spectator.

Since we moved to the US when I was 13 years old, the only people to attempt to drench me with water on Easter Monday have been my brothers. As to how dousing me with water is going to help improve my health for the upcoming spring, I have yet to figure out.

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