Easter Fun Facts

Easter Fun Facts

Easter, like Christmas, is a “blended” holiday: born from desire by Christian missionaries in the early Middle Ages to win over their pagan hosts, existing pagan celebrations were adapted to coincide with Christian holy days. That all sounds rather serious, but you may be interested to know that the way we now celebrate the holiday of Easter has a rather fun and interesting history. Here are a few fun facts about Easter that you can share at your next Easter brunch! It’s all history and it’s all good! I’ll begin with where Easter started and be sure to cover “where the Easter Bunny comes from” as well as our fun & “eggciting” traditional celebrations of today!

• How did Easter start? 

“Easter” is a term with disputed origins. Eostre, the German/Teutonic goddess of spring, fertility and dawn, is one possible origin. As it is celebrated today, Easter coincides loosely with the vernal equinox in March, marking the official beginning of Spring. Easter has come to have connotations with Christ’s death upon the cross and resurrection three days later, but this holy day wasn’t always referred to as Easter. For that, we have to thank early German Lutherans in the Middle Ages who celebrated “white week,” for the days leading up to that Sunday. It was mistranslated, but “Esostarum” was the week in which Christians seeking baptism would wear white.

• Where did the Easter Bunny come from?

Originally cast as the Easter “hare,” the Easter Bunny is now a famous and essential symbol of Eastertide. The hare was an ancient Egyptian symbol of birth and fertility. Germans called this particular one, Oschter Haws, and brought the rabbit myth over with them when establishing Dutch settlements of the American colonies. Easter Bunny is widely considered to be male and, as the German legend goes, he cavorts about on one evening a year laying colored eggs, and bringing them, along with toys and chocolate, to good little children far and wide.

• Celebrating Easter today

The egg symbol goes back even further historically; nearly every ancient culture looked upon eggs as a symbol of renewal and rebirth – and easy concept to weave with the Christian gospel.

One Easter saying goes, “If there be rain on Easter Day, there shall good grass but little hay!”
Ducks, chicks and the Bunny are all happy to represent Easter in today’s culture. The Easter Bunny brings baskets of toys, eggs, chocolate and other candy, to kids on the Sunday morning of Easter. In fact, 90 million chocolate bunnies are crafted each year. In the 1930’s, when candymakers realized that the jelly bean looked an awful lot like an egg, jelly beans got a whole new lease on life. Today, 16 billion jelly beans are sold. That is an amazing number!!!!

I was once caught in the act of assembling such a basket by my youngest child. Although she said nothing about it on Easter morning, that’s because I had covered my bases by strewing plastic eggs all over the front lawn later that Saturday night, as an additional “sweetener” so that she might continue to believe. Everyone enjoyed the extraordinary efforts of the Easter Bunny that year. My mistake was in supposing that she’d forget next time and assume that a basket-only Easter would convince the next time: I scattered no plastic eggs the following year. I can only tell you that after a tearful dialogue that morning, in which I was reminded that the Easter Bunny brings plastic lawn eggs and Mommy makes the baskets, we had successfully dispatched not only Oschter Haws but Santa and the Tooth Fairy as well. ☺

Forewarned, is forearmed.  You can also check out my article on the history of Easter Eggs – it’s really neat to learn about where they developed, which country began using/making them 1st and so forth!

See below by fun video (I drop an egg in the video) of ideas for egg dying this Easter!