Easter: What is it all about?

Chocolate eggs, fluffy bunnies, hot cross buns?What does Easter mean to you?

Where do all these additions to a serious religious festival come from anyway?

To answer that, we have to look at the very beginnings of Christianity.
The early Church faced two problems: how to convert people who didn't really want to be converted, and, how to avoid being persecuted in the mean time. They came up with a clever and very practical solution.
Wherever possible, the early Christians adjusted their festival days to coincide with feast days of the other religions. This helped both problems.
Firstly it meant that they didn't stand out by celebrating when everyone else was hard at work, and second, by sharing feast days, and taking on a lot of the existing trappings of celebration, they de-mystified themselves and appeared more like regular folk.
Easter is an excellent example.

The Christians needed a special day to celebrate the resurrection - just about the most important day in the Church calendar. Luckily, the pagans, who populated most of Europe in the 2nd century and earlier, celebrated a spring renewal festival in the name of one of their goddesses, Eastre.

So the early church missionaries made a takeover bid and subsumed the Saxon feast day to their own ends. The Church liked order, though, and Eastre was celebrated variously on all sorts of days of the week.So, in AD 325 at the famous Council of Nicaea, a new 'Easter Rule' was declared stating that Easter would always fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox.

To them, this was imposing order! Simply put, it meant that Easter would now always fall on a Sunday, between March 22nd and April 25th. Although different branches of the Church have tried to change the dating of Easter at various times in history, this rule still generally applies today, almost 1700 years later.

The Easter bunny may seem like a particularly modern invention, but in fact, predates Christianity by millennia.
The Saxon goddess Eastre was the same lady that the Babylonians and Assyrians worshipped as Ishtar and the Phoenicians as Astarte. This many-named deity had as her earthly symbol, a hare. In fact, unlikely as it seems, the Easter bunny and Easter eggs are bound together in the same ancient tradition.
Legend had it that in order to impress some children, Eastre changed her pet bird into a hare for them. The hare then proceeded to lay colored eggs.That would have impressed me!This story also explains why eggs are so inextricably linked to Easter. Eggs as icons of rebirth date back into prehistory.
Certainly, the Egyptians buried eggs in their tombs and the Greeks put them on top of graves. But the giving of colored eggs as spring tokens seems to have started with the genetically modified hare that Eastre created.
The early Christians couldn't be seen to take all of the pagan beliefs unquestioningly, so they got their own PR gurus to come up with a suitable Christian tradition to explain the colored eggs.
The Church said that Simon of Cyrene, the kind soul who helped Jesus to carry his cross to Calvary was an egg merchant. When he returned home to his farm after witnessing Christ's death he found that all the eggs laid that day had miraculously turned into a rainbow of colors. Although few records exist from early centuries to prove that early Christians kept the tradition, it seems likely.

Surviving records from the accounts of the court of King Edward I show that in 1290 he ordered 450 eggs to be hand colored and coated in gold leaf to be distributed as gifts to members of his household.
Easter egg hunts, loved by children everywhere, had a much more sinister beginning.

In dark age Europe, it was an annual tradition for men to go hunting through the forests looking for eggs bearing specific patterns on their shells. Such an egg, when found, was much prized as a magical talisman. As belief in magic declined, the hunt continued but now with colored eggs being hidden in advance.
I don't know ... a Cadbury's Cream Egg is still pretty magical to me!

The hare symbol may well have died out were it not for the Germanic Saxons who kept the image going through their own folklore.
When many Germans moved to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they brought their traditions with them.
At the time, American Christianity was very puritan and the idea of colored eggs and fluffy bunnies was far too frivolous. But after the Civil War, the nation needed a symbol of rebirth and so the celebration of Easter became more widespread along with a relaxation of dogma.Frivolity had come of age.
At the same Council of Nicaea, in AD 325, it was also decided that the cross would be the official symbol of Christianity. It was a good thing too, because Christian folk had been using the sign for ages, unofficially.

Which brings us to hot cross buns.A modern culinary treat?Not in the least!They were the official food of the festival of good old Eastre way back before the Christians had anything to do with it.
The word 'bun' comes from the Saxon 'boun' which means 'sacred ox'. At the ceremony an ox was sacrificed and little cakes whose top was scored with the sign of the ox's horns were passed to the celebrants. As this was such an integral part of the pagan feast, the Christians kept the cake, but moved one of the lines on top so it was less of a 'V' and more of an 'X'. Anyway, hot vee buns doesn't have quite the same ring.
Interestingly, in the archeological digs at Herculaneum, the city destroyed with Pompeii in AD 79, hot cross buns have been found still in the baker's ovens.Only not quite so hot anymore.
Of course, in those early days, the recipe lacked currants and raisins, and sticky glazed frosting hadn't been invented.But the thought was there.

Which came first, the bunny or the egg?
As far as candy treats are concerned, it must be the bunny. Those Germans who made it to Pennsylvania can be blamed for much of the tooth decay that happens at this time of year.
In the early 18th century, they used to make elaborate confections from pastry and sugar in the shape of a rabbit to celebrate Easter.
The earliest known chocolate eggs were made in France and Germany in the early 19th century. Before then, eating chocolate was not able to be molded.
The first truly modern chocolate egg was not made until 1875, when John Cadbury introduced them to his range.

So, this Easter, as you are enjoying your candies and cakes, spare a thought for the goddess Eastre, for the early Christians, desperate to spread their word and avoid persecution and for tradition-bound Germans.

Without them all, our modern-day celebrations would be very different.

But most of all, remember who this is all in aid of. Without Him, it would all be rather pointless. _______________________________________________________