Wednesday, April 25, 2007
The Ghosts of Easters Past!
Easter has come and gone. Now only the ghosts of Easters past remain. How did the Easter egg and the Easter bunny come to be associated with an otherwise religious holiday? Please note that almost everyone uses the term “bunny” instead of “rabbit.” The latter suggests ties to ancient fertility rites while the former is a whitewashed variation—much like the cleaned up versions of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Nowadays people dress up in Easter suits just as they do Santa suits. However, there is one noticeable difference. There is no padding for the bunny costume. It would make the “rabbit” look pregnant and that would never do. And in actuality the rabbit should be a female. Since the female member of the species must lay the eggs. On the other hand, how it is possible for a female bunny to lay eggs in the first place? Are they not supposed to be mammals? And how does the “rabbit” speed around the world to deliver the eggs? There is a breed of giant rabbits grown in Germany that might shed some light on the latter matter. And how does a “rabbit” lay those plastic eggs, complete with foil-wrapped chocolate? Bugs might have the answers, but I don’t. Where I grew up no one even pretended that the Easter goodies came from the bunny. It saved parents from a lot of difficult answers.
The chicken has a more logical association with the egg. Everyone has toyed with the question of which came first, “the chicken or the egg”? In Easters pasts it was commonplace to pick up some baby chickens for the kids on Easter morning. This practice apparently started in rural areas and the youthful recipient was charged with raising the fowl to adulthood to ensure a plentiful supply of chicken and dumplings or chicken and dressing. When it became apparent in more modern times that 99 percent of the baby chicks did not survive until the next morning, the practice of picking up baby chicks at the five and dime came to an end.
In England less than two centuries ago it was a customary practice for teenagers to do mischief in the wee hours of Easter morn. It was payback time for wrongs committed. Gates were removed from hinges and other foul acts were done as well. Children went to their neighbors and if they were not suspected of having committed any dire deeds over the last year they might receive an egg as a token of gratitude. Back then an egg was a valuable commodity. (It still is according to the script in Chicken Run). So there we have one of the first associations of the egg with Easter. The mischief part of the holiday was transferred to Halloween.
The problem was that eggs had become an integral part of Easter. If neighbors would no longer deliver the goods then it was up to the parents. Hence the bunny! Don’t ask and don’t tell would be appropriate here.
As I grew up, I was always disappointed because there were never enough eggs for the five of us to dye. So when I became a parent myself, I decided to do something about the egg-coloring business. The Jaycees sponsored an annual Easter Egg Hunt but always had trouble finding volunteers to color a 100 dozen eggs. So I volunteered to color 10 dozen myself. For an adult that would be a daunting task. However, I had three kids who always wanted more and more eggs to dye. So they dyed and dyed and dyed: the eggs, their hands, their clothes and the table. And then they wanted more eggs.
We delivered the eggs to a local park that had been mowed to about an inch of the ground. One hundred dozen eggs were scattered around no more than three or four feet apart. Every egg was in plain sight. Fifty or sixty small fry lined up for the start, each carrying an Easter basket and everyone was dressed in Easter finery. At the start every child made a pell-mell dash to the opposite side of the field, passing over hundreds of eggs in the process. It was an Easter stampede. There was a prize for the winner. And the winner was a small child who tarried behind the others and picked up huge quantities of trampled eggs and a few intact eggs that fell from the baskets of those who were running too far too fast. It was an Easter Egg Hunt to remember.
