Why do we love the Easter bunny?
Because he’s an adorable fellow who sneaks around the garden in the dead of night while kids and parents are fast asleep dreaming of chocolate. He doesn’t do any breaking and entering by sliding down the chimney like Santa.
And if you were ever to ask one of them to bail you out of jail, would you choose the smiling rodent with the outsize incisors, mischievous grin and talent for hiding things — or the hypocritical, hard-line moralist with a “naughty list”?
No matter what faith you follow or don’t follow, it’s hard not to get caught up in the Easter hype as eggs and bunnies of all shapes and sizes line supermarket shelves, tempting the shoppers of tasteless Matzah meal to change isles and making the day extra long for Ramadan fasters.
CONVERGENCE OF HOLY DAYS
It’s that time of the year when many people across the world celebrate holidays of the main Abrahamic religions.
This year, Easter Sunday comes a few weeks before the Jewish Passover, which is on April 22, while Islam’s Holy Month of Ramadan started on the evening of Sunday, March 10 and ends on Tuesday, April 9 with Eid al-Fitr, a holiday of feasting.
Easter always falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon that follows the spring equinox in close proximity to a key point in the solar year: the vernal equinox when there are equal times of light and darkness in the day.
Here in South Africa, we’re tending to longer nights and shorter, colder days, while in the northern hemisphere, spring is on its way — to the relief of people coming out of the chilly months.
WHAT’S IN A NAME
The naming of the celebration as “Easter” apparently goes back to the name of a pre-Christian goddess in England, Eostre (Ostara, Oestera), who was celebrated at the beginning of spring. The Eostre celebration pays tribute to the renewal of the Earth, the rebirth of life after the dead of winter as she was the pagan fertility goddess of humans and crops. The symbols of the festival were hares — because they breed like rabbits, and eggs, representing fertility and new life. Eostre is also the root of the word oestrogen, the female fertility hormone.
EASTER AND PASSOVER
Instead of the name “Easter”, lots of cultures refer to the holiday by a name that best translates to “Passover” (for instance, “Pascha” in Greek, “Paskha” in Russian). In the Hebrew Bible, the Passover festival commemorates the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt, as narrated in the Book of Exodus.
It’s the most important Jewish seasonal festival, celebrated on the first full moon after the vernal equinox. According to some historical speculation, at the time of Jesus, Passover had special significance, as the Jewish people were again under the dominance of the Romans. Jewish pilgrims are said to have streamed into Jerusalem every year in the hope that they would be liberated.
According to Brent Landau, lecturer in religious studies at The University of Texas, Jesus travelled over Passover to Jerusalem with his disciples to celebrate the festival and entered the ancient city in a triumphal procession, which created a disturbance in the Jerusalem Temple, attracting the attention of the Romans.
Some say this led to his execution around the year A.D. 30. “Some of Jesus’ followers believed that they saw him alive after his death, experiences that gave birth to the Christian religion,” says Landau.
“As Jesus died during the Passover festival and his followers believed he was resurrected from the dead three days later, it was logical to commemorate these events in close proximity.”
Some early Christians chose to celebrate the resurrection of Christ on the same date as the Jewish Passover, which fell around day 14 of the month of Nisan, in March or April. These Christians were known as Quartodecimans (the name means “Fourteeners”).
“By choosing this date, they put the focus on when Jesus died and also emphasised continuity with Judaism, out of which Christianity emerged. Some others preferred to hold the festival on a Sunday, since that was when Jesus’ tomb was believed to have been found,” says Landau.
“In A.D 325, the Emperor Constantine, who favoured Christianity, convened a meeting of Christian leaders to resolve important disputes at the Council of Nicaea. The most fateful of its decisions was about the status of Christ, whom the council recognised as ‘fully human and fully divine’. This council also resolved that Easter should be fixed on a Sunday, not on day 14 of Nisan.”
GREEK EASTER
For Orthodox Greeks, Easter or Pascha is the most important religious holiday of the year and it’s celebrated over a whole week — Megali Evdomada, also known as “Great Week” or “Passion Week”. A game called tsougrisma is played, where two players hold red eggs (kokkina avga) and take turns tapping or clinking the other’s egg, trying to crack their opponent’s egg. The winner is the one left with their egg whole. Women traditionally coloured eggs on Holy Thursday with an onion peel-based colourant, which makes the eggs a rich red colour, symbolic of Jesus’ blood. Today, people buy special red dye to paint eggs, and ready-made red eggs are available at Greek supermarkets.
WHAT CAME FIRST, THE RABBIT OR THE EGG?
For a long time, Easter was more popular with Catholics and Protestants, looked down on by Puritans as too tainted by non-Christian influences to be appropriate to celebrate, according to Landau.
Also, it tended to be an opportunity for heavy drinking and mischief-making. But in the 19th century, the holiday came to be associated with children and family because the focus on children had changed. They were no longer seen as second-class citizens, instead childhood started being recognised as a time to dote on and spoil our offspring, and chocolate eggs and bunnies became popular.
The mythical, egg-laying furball is believed to have hopped over to America in the 18th century with German immigrants. The “Osterhase” brought brightly painted eggs (a long-standing European tradition) — and later, chocolates — to obedient children, who were sent out to discover them on Easter Sunday. The largest Easter egg hunt ever held was in Florida in 2007 when 9,753 children went looking for 501,000 eggs in the Cypress Gardens Adventure Park in Winter Haven.
The biggest chocolate rabbit weighed 4,245.5kg and was made in Brazil in 2017 by nine chocolatiers, working for eight consecutive days. It was 4.52m high, 2.11m wide and 1.76m long. The tallest Easter egg was made in Italy in 2011 and it was over 10m tall and weighed 2664kg.
EASTER'S DANCE OF DEATH
Easter isn’t celebrated in the same way around the world. Every year, the villagers of Verges in Catalonia, Spain near Barcelona, on the evening of Easter Thursday (Maundy Thursday) celebrate the La Dansa de la mort — “The dance of death”. The dance is performed by five “skeletons”: two adults and three children. One of the adults holds a black banner, and the other, a scythe — each bears a motto: in Catalan, Lo temps és breu, or Time is short; and, in Latin, Nemini parco, or I spare no-one. Two kids carry plates filled with ash. The third has a clock without handles, all signifying the reality that we can turn to ash at any moment.
EASTER IS KAWAII
Though it’s sadly missing from their calendar this year, Tokyo Disneyland has traditionally held a two-month celebration of Easter, though Easter is not a religious holiday in Japan. Why do they do it then? All because of “kawaii”, the Japanese love of the cute aesthetic — bold, cartoon-like lines and rounded forms — which informs a large segment of Japanese popular culture, think Hello Kitty. The egg and bunny traditions of Easter are perfectly suited to the Japanese love of kawaii and Tokyo Disneyland’s Hippity-Hoppity Springtime Parade is the main draw for Easter there.
OTHER UNUSUAL TRADITIONS
The Scoppio del Carro — Explosion of the Cart — has been held in Florence, Italy on Easter Sunday for over nine centuries. An ornate cart, packed with fireworks and other pyrotechnics, is lit by a dove-shaped rocket. It originates in the first Crusade (1099), when, according to Wikipedia, Europeans laid siege to the city of Jerusalem in a conflict to claim Palestine for Christianity.
In Guatemala in a town called Chivarreto, locals celebrate Good Friday by having bare knuckle bouts with the men from neighbouring Pasajoc village. The reason for the rivalry depends on who you ask, but the Pasajoc fighters claim the men from their village used to roll into Chivarreto on Easter Friday and steal the local women away.
On Easter Monday in Szentendre, close to the Hungarian capital Budapest, young men drench girls and young women with buckets of water in an old fertility rite that dates back to pre-Christian times. The women, in turn, present the men with beautifully coloured eggs on Easter Monday.
The White House in Washington, DC, hosts an Easter egg roll-on, held on the South Lawn. Families eat picnic lunches on blankets and children play games like “toss and catch” and “egg picking,” knocking eggs together to see which would crack first. More than 35,000 tickets are distributed by a public lottery, and the current president usually watches proceedings from the South Portico of the White House.
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