Spring Holidays 2010: Easter, Passover, Nowruz and Songkran

Image via Flickr user Kıvanc NisSpring is coming! Saturday, March 20 is the vernal equinox, so although one can never be sure that the weather will cooperate, we can at least console ourselves with the idea that it’s technically spring.

With the season comes some excellent food holidays. Passover will start on March 30 and Easter comes along on April 4. If you are looking for some new cooking ideas for your Passover Seder or Easter brunch, the below calendar has some upcoming cooking classes, demos and tastings for those two holidays.  I’m also including in that the general “Spring” calendar, because I think many of those general classes will cover things that you could use for holiday entertaining.

And if you are planning a Passover Seder, check out my Field Trip to a recent free tasting of Passover foods at Whole Foods.

But spring holidays aren’t limited to those two, and there are a couple others coming up that might inspire some food-related curiosity.

One is Nowruz, a traditional Iranian spring festival meaning “New Day” that is celebrated on the first day of spring. (In fact, it’s celebrated by a lot of cultures, Wikipedia notes it’s celebrated as Nowruz in Afghanistan, by Pashtuns and folks of the Zoroastrian and Twelver Shi’a faiths. It’s called Newroz by the Kurds, Novruz in Azerbaijan, Naw-Rúz in the Bahá'í Faith and Navroz by Parsis and Kashmiri Pandits.)

Friday night, the Iranian American Community Alliance is putting on a Nowruz celebration at Town Hall Seattle with music, wine, tea, appetizers and sweets. It’s $20/$10 for kids. 

If you want to try some of the foods associated with this holiday at home, the Seattle Public Library carries the cookbook Happy Nowruz: Cooking with Children to Celebrate the Persian New Year.

And a little later in April, running from April 13 through 16, you’ll have Songkran, the Thai New Year.  The holiday is all about getting the new year off to a clean start using lots of water. As Wikipedia notes, “The most obvious celebration of Songkran is the throwing of water. People roam the streets with containers of water or water guns (sometimes mixed with mentholated talc), or post themselves at the side of roads with a garden hose and drench each other and passersby.”  But, as the BBC explains, “This three-day water-soaking fest is done without malice, as the smiling faces everywhere will attest. The official holiday is marked by all sorts of entertainment from parades and beauty pageants to singing and dancing in the streets.”

While I haven’t found any Songkran events in Seattle just yet, maybe consider having your own celebration featuring some homemade Thai food and water guns. Seattle always has a ton of Thai cooking classes to choose from, so check out Fresh-Picked Thai page for some ideas to help you pull together a tasty Songkan menu.

But back to where we started, with Passover, Easter and Spring: here’s the event calendar for events related to those.