The Difference Between Modern Easter Witches and the Ones 400 Years Ago

Lets Just Say, It's a Much Nicer Time In History to Be a Witch!

Dear reader,

Easter was last month, you say.

Yes, I know! I couldn’t help it. On March 31, I posted the drawing below of my childhood friend and me dressed up as Easter witches. This little, cute Substack note got my curious mind searching the Internet, which in turn inspired a few more drawings and eventually enough content for a newsletter. The background of this custom is both sadly dark and fascinating!

My note said, “In Sweden, kids dress up as witches for Easter. It resembles American Halloween. The Easter witches “fly” from door to door to collect candy in their teakettles. It’s still cold outside, so winter jackets and pants have to be worn as well.”

Swedish kids grow up hearing the folktale about the witches flying on their brooms to Blaakula to party with the devil on Thursday before Easter. Blaakula is an imaginary geographical place, kind of like Santa Claus’s North Pole.

After some Googling, I found this great Swedish social studies site that took me through the background of the folktale and revealed its darker historical truth: the Witch Hunts of the 1600s.

Why Thursday before Easter? According to the Bible, Judas betrayed Jesus the day before Good Friday. People believed evil spirits were especially active during this day of the year. The church, the authority and power behind the witch hunts, often used children’s (coached/made-up) testimonies as proof in their prosecutions against the women they accused of being witches. We know this because Sweden still has the church records from these trials.

Some children accused their own mothers.

There was also the Float-or-Sink test. The accused woman was thrown into a lake. Remember, it wasn’t common for people to know how to swim. If the woman floated (many women had poofy dresses that trapped air), it was proof that she was a witch and executed, but if she sank (drowned), she received a Christian burial.

My Swedish social studies source said that between 1450 and 1750, more than 30,000 people were executed in Europe for being witches.

In returning to modern times, my dad was not a fan of his daughter dressing up as an Easter witch. But not because of religious or historical reasons.

This was an obedience dilemma. I had to decide if and how I could participate in a fun kids’ Easter tradition without Dad hearing about it. The risk of getting caught was low. My childhood friend, Mats, lived on the other side of the neighborhood, and our parents were acquaintances but not friends.

Mats’s parents were a lot cooler than my parents.

With strict parents, I learned to keep secrets at an early age. But I don’t think that I was exceptionally naughty. And who knows if I kept secrets at all, or if my parents chose not to confront me. I’m a parent myself and have to choose my battles. The truth was probably 50/50, but I’ll never know for sure.

Yeller Update

It’s been a month since I self-published my first comic book, and the reader reviews have been overwhelmingly positive and encouraging!

Thank you, Margreet de Heer, my dear pen pal and Substack comic artist friend!! Magreet lives in Germany and wanted a copy of Yeller, but instead of figuring out how she could pay me 10 U.S. dollars, I suggested an exchange.

So far, I have found happy homes for 23 of my 50 printed book babies!

Message me if you would like a copy of Yeller. I donate the profits to Canine Companions, an organization that trains and places service dogs.

That’s all for this newsletter! Thank you for reading!