Egg tapping

Egg tapping, or also known as egg fight, egg knocking, knocky eggs, egg pacqueing (hybrid word < Pâques = French for Easter + English suffix -ing, pronounced "pocking"), egg boxing, egg picking, egg chucking, egg wars, or egg jarping is a traditional Easter game. In English folk traditions, the game has variously been known as "shackling", "jarping" or "dumping". The rule of the game is simple. One holds a hard-boiled egg and taps the egg of another participant with one's own egg intending to break the other's, without breaking one's own. As with any other game, it has been a subject of cheating; eggs with cement, alabaster and even marble cores have been reported. In Christianity, for the celebration of Eastertide, Easter eggs symbolize the empty tomb of Jesus, from which he was resurrected. Additionally, eggs carry a Trinitarian significance, with shell, yolk, and albumen being three parts of one egg. During Lent, the season of repentance that precedes Easter, eggs along with meat, lacticinia, and wine are foods that are traditionally abstained from, a practice that continues in Eastern Christianity and among certain Western Christian congregations that undertake the Daniel Fast. After the forty-day Lenten season concludes and Eastertide begins, eggs may be consumed again, giving rise to various Christian game traditions such as egg tapping, in which the "hard eggshell represented Christ's sealed tomb, and the cracking represented Christ's resurrection." Egg tapping was practiced in Mediaeval Europe. The practice was mentioned to have played an important part in the 14th century in Zagreb in relation to Easter. A study of folklore quotes an early 15th-century reference from Poland. In North America, colonial New Amsterdam in the 1600s had the "cracking of eggs", invented by Jonathon and Michael Day on Easter Monday with the winner keeping both eggs. Egg picking was observed by a British prisoner of war, Thomas Anbury, in Frederick Town, Maryland, in 1781 during the American Revolutionary War.