On Holy Saturday of each year, one may observer the blessing of colorful Easter baskets in many Slovak churches across the Northeast and Midwest. This is one of the few Old World nonreligious customs that Slovak Americans still practice as a part of a religious holiday (the other being an elaborate Christmas Eve feast) after three or four generations of living in the New World.
Slovaks are a small ethnic group (approximately five million live in today's Czechoslovakia), with over a million residing in the United States. Linguistically they belong to the West Slavs of Europe (the other West Slavs being the Poles, Czechs, and Lusatian Sorbs), although culturally they are closer to the non-Slavic Magyars or Hungarians, with whom they shared the Kingdom of Hungary from the eleventh century to 1918.
The largest number of Slovaks (over half a million) came to the United States before World War I. Overpopulation, lack of arable land, and lack of industry drove nineteenth-century Slovaks out of northern Hungary and into the United States, where there used to be plenty of jobs for unskilled peasants. The burgeoning coal mines, steel mills, and oil refineries, which paid the highest wages to unskilled workers, attracted the greatest number of Slovaks, primarily between the years 1880 and 1914. Northern New Jersey, eastern and western Pennsylvania, northern Ohio, the Detroit region, and the Chicago area were their principal regions of settlement.
Shortly after they arrived in the United States, Slovak immigrants banded together and formed tight-knit communities that resurrected some Old World traditions and created new ones in response to American conditions. Because the initial immigrants were largely single young men, they sought out boarding houses located near their places of work that were run by the few Slovak women among them. While living in these boarding houses, they discussed the absence of any social welfare system in America. These immigrants set up fraternal benefit societies to help who fell ill, who were maimed by industrial accidents, or who were killed on the job. (And there were plenty of such occurrences in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries.)
The fraternal benefit societies, in turn, took the lead in establishing Slovak parishes in America. Approximately 80 percent of Slovaks professed Roman Catholicism, 15 percent were Lutheran, and the rest were either Greek Catholic or Calvinist. No matter what their religious persuasion, virtually all Slovaks wished to worship in their own language. Therefore, they built over three hundred parish churches between 1885 and 1930. These parishes became the centers of the Slovak communities in the United States; many of the most important celebrations, religious or otherwise, took place in or around the parish.
Slovak Easter traditions
Before the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s, Slovak Catholics in the United States tended to measure time by the church calendar and the religious customs that accompanied this calendar. For instance, they marked "Corpus Christi" Sunday in the spring with a religious procession to various altars near their churches bordered by freshly chopped birch trees. During the summer they had a special celebration on Saint Anne's day (July 26), featuring missionary priests and the sale of holy oil to help cure the
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