The most hotly-tipped ‘dream toys’ for this Christmas were unveiled recently.

Film and TV shows have made their mark on this year’s wish-lists for both boys and girls.

And hi-tech gadgets rub shoulders with more traditional board games and dolls in the Toy Retailer Association’s predicted top toys for Christmas.

A Dr Who Cyberman Mask and the interactive toy car Fast Talkin’ McQueen, inspired by the hit movie Cars, will be hot favourites with boys this year.

Hollywood movies Pirates Of The Caribbean and Star Wars have also made their mark, inspiring the Isla Cruces playset and a Transformer toy set.

The girls’ top 12 list includes a Disney Princess chair, and a Let’s Dance Barbie, based on the sixth Barbie movie, will add a new twist to the long-standing favourite doll.

Pre-schools will prefer toys inspired by Bob The Builder and Thomas The Tank Engine.

Their top 12 also includes the V Smile Baby game, an interactive toy for children as young as nine months.

For older children, the list includes Hasbro’s Trivial Pursuits 90s and the electronic board game of Deal Or No Deal.

Toy Retailers Association (TRA) chairman Gary Sadler said: ‘We are currently seeing a resurgence in licensed toys, which combine fun and playability with the familiarity of popular characters.’

The TRA’s independent predictions are based on retailers’ opinions, items requested by shoppers and the latest trends in new products.

Czech Republic > A woman decorates Easter eggs with traditional designs. Easter eggs are famed for their geometrical designs applied with the use of wax.

The first Faberge egg was made by Peter Carl Faberge in 1885. Only 50 original Faberge eggs were ever completed, constructed by the House of Faberge for the Russian Czars between 1885 and 1917 to commemorate Easter.

The company was closed down by the Bolsheviks in 1917 after the October Revolution. No further eggs were made until 1989 when a licence to design and market them was awarded to jeweller Victor Mayer, of Pforzheim, Germany, in 1989.

The immaculate detail and quality of the original eggs led to them achieving worldwide fame, and a reputation as a byword for luxury. The appearance of the eggs varied wildly, and are all based around an individual theme.

Arguably the most famous is the Coronation Egg, manufactured in 1893 to mark the coronation of Czar Nicholas II the following year. It was sold at auction in 2004 for an estimated $24m. It has featured in two films, the Bond movie Octopussy saw a fake version mysteriously appear at a party at the British Embassy in Berlin, while Oceans Twelve revolves around a plot to steal the egg from a museum and replace it with a holographic image of itself.

Pippa, a 17-year-old Cockatoo, has spent two weeks trying to hatch a bowl of chocolate Easter eggs intended for visitors to an English wildlife center, the owner said Wednesday.

“It is very comical. She is not usually maternal so it has come as a bit of a surprise,” said Geoff Grewcock, of the Nuneaton and Warwickshire Wildlife Sanctuary in central England. “We had a lot of cream eggs so we put them in a dish on a table for people to take. When we got Pippa out, she went straight to them and began nesting on them,” he said.

“She is so protective over them and if anyone goes near them she will attack,” Grewcock added. “They are going to melt if we don’t take them away. We are taking them away gradually so she should be OK. I think she thinks they should be hatching now and has starting pecking at them. It is very strange.”

We eat them, paint them, arrange them next to the Easter bunny, and give them as tokens of friendship. The Easter egg season is here.

An egg is dormant but contains a new life sealed within, and is therefore the perfect symbol for fertility and the beginning of spring. Easter egg stories abound in many cultures. It seems that eggs have always been trendy. For example, eggs as a symbol of new life are found in early Roman Spring feasts, in Jewish traditions, and in stories about ancient gods and goddesses. The ancient Persians painted eggs for their New Year, which falls in the spring. Mary Magdalene is said to have greeted the Emperor of Rome with “Christ is risen” and given him a red egg.

Despite Easter’s association with Christianity, most scholars believe that it was originally a pagan fertility rite that celebrated the rebirth of life. The Easter egg may also have celebrated the end of the privations of fasting, when traditionally all meat and dairy products were prohibited. Whoever started the egg business, it has certainly been a successful one, provoking admiration and interest that has lasted for centuries.

Eggs are also a central feature of spring culture in Finland. All those who want to know more should visit the Easter egg exhibition on the fortress island of Suomenlinna in Helsinki, featuring different egg decoration techniques, eggs painted by local artists, as well as delicious traditions that simply cannot be missed!

Pääsiäismunanäyttely (Easter egg exhibition) 1 – 11 April, Church of Suomenlinna, Helsinki. Opening times Wed-Thu 12-4pm.

Related Links > www.suomenlinna.fi

Easter was last March for most Christians, but Holy Week is just beginning for more than 300 million Orthodox Christians in the world.

The date for Orthodox Easter, which is celebrated next Sunday, is based on the early Julian calendar, in which Easter follows the first full moon after the vernal equinox and always follows the Jewish Passover. Orthodox Lent, ”is a period of fasting and repentance, a looking within oneself to see how one can grow closer to God,” said the Rev. Dean Panagos of Saint Luke the Evangelist Orthodox Church in Columbia.

“The period of prayer and confession concludes as we enter the last week of Christ’s earthly life,” he said. “We focus on the Last Supper, the tomb and the Resurrection.”

Services at St. Luke’s are celebrated every night next week, and each service will “meditate on a particular theme of Holy Week,” he said. “As the week progresses, we become - both mystically and actually - part of the events of Christ’s life,” he said. For example, “we are there at the washing of the feet at the Last Supper, we are there in the garden scene.”

Next Saturday, Easter begins at midnight. “That service will be the culmination of 50 days of preparing for this one big event,” he said. “We begin in the middle of the night. Our bodies tell us we should be sleeping, but God tells us that we should be awake,” he said. “For me, Easter is a renewal of hope and love in a world that is full of craziness,” he said. “There is this immense feeling that God is with us, he cares for us and he loves us.”

As the journey of our Lenten ended, the hearts of the faithful beat with anticipation of the Great Feast of Feasts, Holy Pascha, or what many in the Western Church call Easter. This year our feast Sunday Easter or  Holy Pascha is on April 27.

Many wonder why there are two separate dates set aside for the Great Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ and why we call these feasts by different terms. Allow me first to tackle the question of the date of celebration of Easter/Pascha and its names.

Firstly, why do we call the Eastern feast Pascha and the Western feast Easter? The term Pascha comes from the Hebrew word pesah, a yearling lamb that was sacrificed at Passover. In Exodus 12:5. the Angel of the Lord was instructed to kill the first-born of the Egyptians but to pass over the Jewish homes marked by the blood of the lamb. Passover in Greek is Pascha. Christ is our Passover Lamb, who gave himself for the life of the world (I Cor. 5:7). For those who believe in Christ, there is no spiritual death. Thus, death passes over those of us marked by the Lamb of God.

The term Easter comes from the spring festival of Eastre honoring the pagan goddess of fertility. She was symbolized by the rabbit, which is where the Easter Bunny started. Since the pagan festival fell at approximately the same time as the Feast of the Resurrection, the feast became commonly called Easter in the West, during the assimilation of pagans into Christianity. Officially, it is called the Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord, in both Western (Catholic) and Eastern (Orthodox) Churches, both then and now.

The dating of the celebration of The Feast of the Resurrection is a more complex matter. The date of Pascha was determined by the First Ecumenical Council held in Nicea in 325 AD. The 318 bishops present stipulated that Easter/Pascha must be celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon of the vernal (spring) equinox, according to the Julian calendar in use at the time, and may not coincide with the Jewish Passover.

Because the Julian calendar is off by about one day every 128 years, there was a need for a more accurate calendar. In 1582 Pope Gregory of Rome corrected this error by dropping 10 days and establishing the Gregorian calendar. The new date of the vernal equinox, a key element in calculating Easter/ Pascha, no longer fell on the same day that it did in the Julian calendar.

In 1922 most Eastern Orthodox Churches adopted the Gregorian calendar for all feast days except for Pascha and those feasts related to Pascha, such as Palm Sunday and Pentecost, because the new calendar does not take into account the Jewish element of Passover. Every few years the dates of Easter and Pascha coincide, as they will next year. But they could be far apart as well, such as in 2008, when Easter is on March 23 and Pascha is on April 27.

Whether you celebrate the Resurrection of Our Lord on April 16 or 23, or whether your new day begins at sunup or at sundown (as it does for those in the Orthodox and the Jewish faiths), what is important is where your heart is.

For those of us who call ourselves Christian, no matter what tradition, everyday is Resurrection Day. Allow me to close with some words from our Paschal Liturgy: “Today is the Day of Resurrection! Let us shine with the Feast! Let us embrace one another! Let us say, Brethren! And to those that hate us, and in this wise exclaim: Christ is Risen from the dead; trampling down death by death; and upon those in the tombs bestowing Life! Christ is Risen! Indeed He has Risen!”