Phrases

“HANDLED LIKE A HÍMESTOJÁS” (Easter Egg)

When one handles somebody or something like a hímestojás it means that the person takes absolutely good care of that somebody or something. Frequently we also hear a variation of the above saying: “takes care of him/her/it as if it were a hímestojás.

The decorated egg is knowingly connected with the custom of water plunging on Easter Monday. LOCSOLÁS – dousing with water – is a very old custom. In pagan times dousing girls with water was a magical fertility act. Today young men sprinkle the girls and ladies with scented water or rose water (cologne). But at the beginning of the 20^th century, especially in the villages and on the farmlands, the girls were still showered with water by the bucket full at the wells. The girls rewarded the young men in return with painted, written, scratch-carved or just plain red eggs.

The custom of giving decorated eggs to the boys and young men for the locsolás reaches back to the times before Christianity. Our word hímes comes from the noun hím, which is an old Hungarian word for the decor, beauty, embellishment, and the male gender; it is also the basic word for the verb hímez, which means to embroider, decorate, embellish. The eggs are decorated by the scratch-carve technique or with a scriber (gicce, íróka), which is similar to the slip trailer used by potters. The custom of egg decorating is very old in our country. (Ferenc Móra, a writer and museologist found a scratch-carved eggshell in a HUN-AVAR grave near Szeged – Hun-Avar period ca. 400-700 A.D. )

How did a saying evolve from the custom of handling hímestojás with such care and caution? A simple explanation could be the fact that even an ordinary egg must be handled delicately so that it does not break. So much more does a beautiful hímestojás deserve the gentle handling and attention of its owner.

It is also feasible that our saying originated in those times when the Easter (decorated) egg symbolized procreativity and life. This symbolic memory is preserved in the folk custom of kokányolás, where in certain regions of Hungary children played a game with the hímestojások. They would tap their eggs together to see whose egg would stay intact. The one whose egg broke was the loser in the game, and the others made fun of him. It is understandable that the youngsters of earlier times, who knew the superstitious root of this saying, took extraordinary care of the decorated egg, which they received as a symbol of fertility and life.