Thanks for sharing information about your customs in Germany with us Christine! Many of our customs in the US are the same. I believe a lot of them came here through the Pennsylvania Dutch (German immigrants to America).

http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/history/mnstatehistory/german_migration.html

German immigrants had been coming to the United States since the U.S. was a colony of Britain. Many of the early immigrants came to the U.S. in search of religious freedom. Later, as a result of the Napoleonic Wars (1796-1815), individuals sought freedom from military involvement and political oppression. German migration to Minnesota, however, was at its peak during the decades of the 1860s and 1870s.

During these two decades, many German individuals had already been in the United States for some time, arriving in the 1850s and having settled in Midwestern states with high concentrations of Germans, such as Wisconsin and Ohio. Their reasons for leaving Europe for these new homes in the United States were many. One reason was the development of mechanized manufacturing of goods. Increasing industrialization and the use of machines to perform tasks previously done by manual labor threatened cottage industries and drove many individuals to the city in search of employment. Unfortunately, the cities quickly became overcrowded and the availability of jobs there also declined, forcing some people to return to their homes in the rural areas or to migrate to the United States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-Americans_in_the_Civil_War

During the American Civil War, over 200,000 native Germans served in the Union Army. German-Americans in the American Civil War were the largest contingent to fight under the Union with New York and Ohio both providing ten divisions dominated largely by native-born Germans

http://www.geocities.com/ohio9reg/9thOhio.html

The 9th Ohio Infantry Regiment was Ohio’s first all-German unit to enter the Union Army during the Civil War, and was one of four raised in the city of Cincinnati alone. The unit served with distinction from 1861-1864 and its story is a perfect example of the forgotten contribution that many Germans made by fighting for their newly adopted country.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American
German Americans (German Deutschamerikaner) are citizens of the United States of ethnic German ancestry and currently form the largest ancestry group in the United States, accounting for 17% of the U.S. population. The first significant numbers arrived in the 1680s in New York and Pennsylvania. Some eight million German immigrants entered the United States since then. Immigration continued in substantial numbers during the 19th century; the largest number of arrivals came 1840–1900. Germans form the largest group of immigrants coming to the U.S., outnumbering the Irish and English. Some arrived seeking religious or political freedom, others for economic opportunities greater than those in Europe, and others simply for the chance to start afresh in the New World. California and Pennsylvania have the largest populations of German origin, with over six million German Americans residing in the two states alone. Over 50 million people in the United States identify German as their ancestry. In the 1990 U.S. census, 58 million Americans claimed to be solely or partially of German descent. In Pennsylvania, English and German were co-official languages until around the time of World War I.

Before the First World War, there were a large number of German-English bi-lingual schools in the United States.

The Pennsylvania Dutch, who were an Anabaptist religious group from the German speaking part of Switzerland did not have as significant an influence on American culture as did the much larger and number of immigrants who came from that part of Europe that became Germany and who assimilated into the mainstream of the U.S. Population. The Pennsylvania Dutch (who are also found in Ohio and Idaho) did not assimilate into the mainstream but live in separate communities,

I grew up in Brooklyn New York (I’m 57 years old now). My family moved north from a Polish section into an Irish section. North of that was a Norwegian section. One of the customs that were retained from Europe was inviting the priest to come to our home on Holy Thursday to bless the food that we would eat for dinner on Easter Sunday. The Polish word for this custom is Swieconka.

This custom is retained in some churces where people bring baskets that represent part of their Easter dinner to a church service on Holy Saturday morning to be blessed there. I know that Our Lady of Czestachowa in Brooklyn, New York and Saint John’s in Mancester Connecticut keep this custom

see the attached links for more information, including recipes

http://www.polishamericancenter.org/Swieconka.htm
http://www.polishamericancenter.org/Easter.htm
http://www.polskiinternet.com/english/info/easter.html
http://www.polamjournal.com/Library/Holidays/Easter/easter.html#beginners