#69: The Easter Eggs
How are the varied traditions of Easter Egg hunts, the Easter Bunny, and Jesus on the Cross connected?
It’s the Easter holidays, and today is the last day of the long bank holiday weekend, when we sit around stuffing ourselves with Easter eggs that we found hidden around the house and garden yesterday. But where do traditions like egg hunts come from?
In my mind, I place Easter as the second biggest holiday next to Christmas. At Christmas, nearly everything shuts down for a few days, the shops are properly shut and people stay inside with families, enjoying the cosy comforts of home on a cold, wintry night. At Easter, though we get around the same number of days off for holiday, things still seem to go on pretty much as normal. I woke up at 7:30am on Easter Sunday to find that the Sainsbury’s across the street was open, 7am–11pm like always. So much for people getting a holiday.
Yet I also feel that we don’t always celebrate Easter in the same intensity as Christmas. The Christmas period begins a month before the actual day, counting down to a day full of presents by opening our daily advent calendars while madly trying to get all of our Christmas shopping done. Easter is longer when you include the Lent period, giving up something like chocolate or dairy for 40 days, but it’s not so widely followed as the 24 days of Advent which often provide daily chocolate treats.
Yet Easter is still popular. Easter egg hunts have been planned, even if Cadbury may have gotten a bit of stick for taking out the word ‘Easter’ from their egg hunt. The shops have been full of the many different chocolate egg choices for months beforehand. And yesterday the Church of England were tweeting about their Easter Sunday service attendances, where a number of Churches were standing room only.
So it seems that Easter Sunday is still a tradition which is followed by a large majority in England. But what are the meanings behind these traditions, where did they come from, and how do they connect? How did we get pretty chocolate eggs covered in foil from the sight of Jesus on the Cross? And where did the Easter Bunny pop up from?
Of course, my source is Wikipedia, so don’t cite me as fact. But I did find some interesting connections, and symbolisms, for the meanings behind Easter. I started off with the eggs, because I do love them. There is just something so satisfying about Easter eggs. When you hold the unwrapped chocolate egg, it is just so smooth and rich in its chocolatey goodness. It’s like holding a beautifully smooth pebble in your palm. And the colours of the foil are pretty, spring colours signifying the coming brightness and light, after the darkness of winter. Hiding them round the garden, it’s like I’m encouraging all of the colourful flowers to start appearing, breaking through the earth into the Easter sun.
Along with loving Easter eggs, I have always enjoyed going on an egg hunt, but this year was the first year that I didn’t go on one myself. Instead, I got to hide them, and I have to say, it’s just as fun to hide them as to find them. Stealthily tiptoeing around the house at 7:30am, I tried not to make a single noise as I hid eggs on high windowsills, in door hinges, and even one in a chandelier. I wasn’t entirely successful, as more than once I found myself wincing as I watched an egg fall and awaited the noise of the rattling egg through the otherwise silent house. Yet I did manage to hide 30–40 eggs (I lost count, hopefully we found them all).
After hiding them, I had another hour or two to wait before the hunting started. So as I wandered through the house yesterday morning, I kept forgetting that I’d hidden all those eggs (I was quite sleepy), and then I would catch one in my eye, a bit of sun reflecting off of the bright and shiny foil covering of a light blue or spring green egg. They’re like Christmas decorations, but more subtle, and I love them.
But where did this tradition come from? I have questioned how ‘Christian’ an egg hunt might be, but apparently Easter Egg hunts are part of the Christian tradition. Even if the egg as a fertility sign may have older, Pagan roots, it also represents Jesus’ tomb. So when we hunt for those eggs we find them like the women found Jesus beside the empty tomb.
And the Easter Bunny? As far as I know there is no bunny in the biblical Easter story. Instead, it exists more as a sign of the fertility of spring (we’ve all heard the phrase ‘breed like rabbits’), although originally it was a Hare, not a bunny. The Easter Hare was a similar figure to Santa Claus, given the role of judge to decide which were the good children who got the eggs or candy.
The Easter Bunny isn’t as important to me as the eggs. What I love is the hiding and searching and finding, and I don’t feel like we need an imaginary bunny to enjoy that. The egg hunt also reminds me of the Jewish tradition of hiding Chametz (leavened bread) on the night before Passover and having the children find it, to help clear the house of all leavened products, which are forbidden during Passover. There is a similar tradition during Passover when the Matzah (unleavened bread) is hidden, which is broken during Seder (a ceremonial meal in which the story of passover is told), and the bigger half of the matzah is hidden for the children to find. But it is not simply a game. In this interesting post about ‘The Hidden Matzah’, Rabbi Harold Schulweis explains how it becomes a symbol of hope for the future, the bigger half to represent the bigger future with more to come.
After escaping the rabbit hole that is internet research, I’ve come away with a deeper, and more interesting understanding of Easter, with its many traditions, more than those that I have mentioned here. As I think about it all, Easter is like Christmas, a holiday about finding hope for the future. But we find hope in a different, and more solid form. Christmas is a promise of hope, a light in the darkness. When we reach Easter and the new season of Spring, it becomes a holiday for physical hope, for the promise that is kept, fulfilled, and renewed. When we go on our Easter egg hunts, we are hunting for hope, welcoming spring into our lives, and celebrating it, and we are finding physical representations of it. Whatever you may believe, Easter is a time for fun games of egg hunting, enjoying the promise of Spring which has begun, and the childlike joy of hope.
