For me it was the chicken – a birthday gift from my sister from another mother. It was a very old brass chicken with 4 legs and a hallmark indicating it was made in Damascus in the late 19th century (See photo #1), purchased in the Old City of Jerusalem by Marion, my best friend. From its age and the size of its opening, we decided that it was an ארגז אתרוג (etrog box) probably from the old Jewish quarter in the capital of Syria that was inhabited by as many as 50,000 Jews at the time the chicken was made. But it was April and Passover, not Succoth, and there were no citrons around – so my mother, who was visiting from the US, decided that we had to fill it with eggs. Not real ones and, despite the timeliness, not hand-painted Easter eggs. She purchased a few multicolored rock eggs from a rock shop in Hutzot HaYotzer, the artists' colony in Jerusalem (See photo #2). But my nephew who lives in New York thought a bunch of colored rocks shaped like eggs just didn't suit that etrog container shaped like a big chicken, so he came through with a black spotted "giant ostrich egg" to emulate the size of an etrog (See photo #3). And that started a whole collection of chickens and eggs.
When I came home after a brief and fortunately not serious hospitalization, two friends gifted me with a funky chicken with a striped body to make me laugh (See photo #4) and a salt and pepper shaker set shaped like an open hard-boiled egg (See photo #5). Little by little, I accumulated other chicken and rooster salt and pepper shakers (See photo #6). One day, on my way to an appointment, I noticed a very funny papier-mâché chicken with painted toenails, very long eyelashes and wearing pearls in the window of a nearby shop – so of course I had to add "her" to my growing collection (See photo #7). And then I acquired three gorgeous facsimiles of the famous Fabergé eggs created as Easter gifts for the wives and mothers of the Russian Tsars (See photo #8).
In my garden outside, there's a bell with a rooster on top which, fortunately, rings rather than shrieking "cock-a-doodle-doo" (See photo #9) although there's another large chicken or rooster in the garden with bobbing eyes (See photo #10) and despite its weirdness, it seems like it should produce that wake-up sound. They say you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket, so I have 4 baskets with painted wooden eggs, an obsidian egg, marble eggs, quartz eggs, ceramic eggs from all over the world: Mexico, France, Italy, Denmark, Russia, Morocco (See photo #11) and even a tiny teapot from Turkey shaped like an egg. And I have two eggs that are actually jigsaw puzzles (See photo #12). If I'm hungry for eggs of any kind or anything else, I have a wooden recipe box with 2 tiny black iron chickens on its roof. (See photo #13),
As a university English teacher with a PhD based on language testing, I spent part of a sabbatical year in China where I gave several lectures on testing English to 2,000 Chinese teachers of English. The unpaid lectures were arranged by the British Council language officer in China, who knew me well from his former stint in Israel and he must have told someone about my chicken and egg collection, because they gifted me with a red cinnabar egg (See photo #14) and an antique cloisonne egg (See photo #15). They joked that they would have given me chickens, but they only had live ones.
So what do you think? Which came first – the chicken or the egg?