#168: The Easter Bunny Costume
Why the Easter Bunny was never a real creature to me
If this were fifteen years ago, today I would have been whisked off to the paper shop with my dad, and upon returning, I would have found the Easter Bunny had hidden chocolate eggs around the garden. To be honest, it would have been far more convenient if he had just left them in a basket. Time saved for both of us.
But every year, this mythical creature hid those eggs under bushes, on the climbing frame, and inside milk bottles. We have the video footage to prove it. One year we were in the Netherlands and the Easter Bunny decided to leave clues in Dutch. Unfortunately, he hadn’t used his phrasebook quite correctly... Another year I came to the conclusion that the Easter Bunny’s diet must include chicken eggs, because he had provided us with an egg box to collect our eggs in.
Even with these clues I never questioned his existence.
Yet if we connect up these clues, we can make the assumption that perhaps the Easter Bunny isn’t real after all. If we recognise that in the above photo, the Easter Bunny is only a costume, a mere synthesised object symbolising a whole tradition, then where did the Easter Bunny come from?
Well, coincidentally, we don’t have to leave Durham — the place I call my home — to find a clue. In Durham’s Cathedral lies the Venerable Bede, and it is Bede’s text The Reckoning of Time, which links the word Easter to Eostre, another form of the word Ostara:
‘Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated “Paschal month”, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month.’
Ostara is a Germanic goddess, a symbol of fertility, renewal and rebirth. She lends her name to the hormone oestrogen and, as is rather more relevant to this blog post, has the head and shoulders of a hare.
And with a few hundred years, some mingling of traditions, a dash of commercialism, and a good old sweet tooth, we are left with the Easter Bunny of today. A character invisible without the power of an object, without a furry (and in the above case a little disturbing) bunny costume.
But for me, even though this photo is from my childhood, the Easter Bunny was never something I could touch. I don’t remember meeting the above character, although the photographic evidence suggests otherwise. While I definitely sat in Santa’s lap, the Easter Bunny was more of a space in time — that gap on Sunday morning as we walked up to the paper shop. It was that half an hour on that specific Sunday that delivered the eggs. It was something that no bunny costume could ever really solidify for me.
The Easter Bunny is an invisible tradition, marked only by the eggs he leaves behind. And perhaps this is what makes him so easy to believe in.
