When I think about Easter I think about eggs. My personal egg-related traditions include more than an egg hunt with my kids; I like to kick off the Easter weekend with egg boxing. Yes, I love the game so much that I have passed on the tradition to my kids, who insist on playing every time we make eggs, which is frequently. We take it seriously—just see the prize belt (below) we made for the egg left standing.
You may have heard me reference the “sport” of egg boxing and my love for it in the past. I also gave an introduction to its history and how it works in a video from a few years ago. Egg boxing doesn’t require a special occasion like Easter to be played, but I wanted to take the opportunity to share the activity with you.
I started the sport when I was about 13 years old. It was the perfect representation of my two loves at the time: boxing and food (and eggs, of which I consumed about a dozen a day to my mom’s chagrin). The rules are pretty simple: you take two eggs and hit them together. The winning egg is the one that doesn’t break and it gets to proceed to the next round, against the next (egg) contender in the queue. For each round that the egg wins, it earns a point. If and when the egg cracks, the new champion egg begins its winning streak journey. These egg-cracking battles continue until you have as many eggs as you want to eat. But guard that precious egg left standing, as it will continue against the next egg, whenever the time comes that you want to have eggs again. Anecdotally, I once had an all-star egg, which I named Ramanujan after the great mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, because of just how prodigious they both were. It won so many rounds that I lost count. It must have been in the very high hundreds or low thousands, as he was the champion for more than a year. I tell his story in another video that my friend Tim Ferriss made about egg boxing. I invite you to watch the video and join in on one of my favorite pastimes.
My Cajun grandfather played this game in the early 1900s in south Louisiana. They called it “knocking” eggs.
My family plays “egg butting” every Easter using hard boiled eggs. As the Easter meal is getting under way, two contestants butt eggs, first head to head and then butt to butt. The winner goes to the next contestant and works their way around the table. The ultimate winner has the egg with at least one end intact. Easter tradition going back to the early 1900’s!