Photo: Miramiska (Shutterstock)
Easter is weird.
To religious people, it’s the most sacred day of the year, a time for reflecting on the central miracle upon which Christianity is based. And, for children, a side of “a magical bunny stopped by last night and left a basket full of painted eggs and candy for you.”
The modern celebration of Easter is rooted so many sources—the Catholic Church, paganism, Judaism, the spring equinox—over so many centuries, it makes sense that it’s a little disjointed. Read on as I try to unravel some of the the mysteries of the “real” Easter.
Easter (or something like it) has been around for a long-ass time
Feasts, celebrations, and/or holy days around the spring equinox pre-date Christianity by thousands of years. Early Christians borrowed the date of Easter (and probably the whole “ritually eating bread” thing known as communion) from the Jews, who had been observing Passover since at least the 5th century BC. Chinese people were celebrating New Years Day in spring long before that. The real “source” of Easter is probably, ultimately, the annual spring equinox, an astronomical occurrence that has been recognized in cultures all over the world since basically forever. It’s the beginning of spring after all, so who wouldn’t celebrate?
How did Easter get its name?
In his 725 book The Reckoning of Time, linguist and historian Saint Bede the Venerable mentions an Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring called “Ēostre.” The whole month of April was named after Ēostre, and it was filled with feasting. In the 1835, Jacob Grimm (half of the Brothers Grimm who wrote all those fairy tales) argued that Easter got its name from the goddess.
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Grimm was probably wrong though. It’s a good theory, and there’s evidence pagans did worship Ēostre, but the consensus among modern historians is that “Easter” is derived from “the Christian designation of Easter week as in albis, a Latin phrase that was understood as the plural of alba (‘dawn’) and became eostarum in Old High German.”
When is Easter, anyway?
I’ve had some long-running arguments in my life, but nothing comes close to the heated discussion among Christians about when Easter should be celebrated. It’s been raging since at least 195 AD, when Pope Victor I attempted to excommunicate the Quartodecimans for thinking Easter should always be celebrated on the 14th day of Paschal Moon. The fools! The Quintodecimans were obviously correct; it should be the 15th day!
A version of the “when is Easter?” argument is still raging today, despite the best efforts of the World Council of Churches. The fine details of the dispute are too boring for me to write about in detail, but the gist is: most Western Christians use the Gregorian calendar to determine the date of Easter. Eastern Orthodox Christians use the older Julian calendar, so the dates don’t match up. This year, Gregorian-stans will have Easter on Sunday April 17, while Team Julian Calendar will have to wait until April 24.
Secular rites of Easter
Official religious observance of Easter is straightforward. Among Catholics, for example, it’s “Go to Mass. Eat the transubstantiated flesh of the Savior.” (This is the Catholic Church’s answer for everything, by the way). The secular hallmarks of the holiday, on the other hand, are as rich, deep, and colorful as that egg you left in the food coloring mix overnight.
Why eggs? And why colored eggs? Here’s one theory about the connection between eggs and Easter: Pagans were into eggs because they considered them a symbol of new life, perfect for a spring equinox feast day. When armies of Roman Catholics invaded and occupied pagan lands, they didn’t stamp out the pagan egg tradition; they swallowed it up. Like an ancient version of the Borg, the early Christian invaders incorporated and claimed the parts of pagan cultures they could live with (eggs on a spring holiday) while discarding the parts they couldn’t (gender equality).
Some don’t buy the pagans-did-it idea, and think the association of eggs and Easter came from Lent. Many people gave up eggs for the Lenten season, so it makes sense that they’d pig out on them on Easter. (That could explain all the candy too.)
Whether the central tenet of Christianity celebrated on Easter (“Our god was killed, but he came back to life, and now we eat his flesh, either symbolically or actually, depending on your persuasion”) is based on pagan mythology is a can of worms I won’t get into here. Instead, let’s talk egg-painting: Christians are thought to have borrowed egg-decorating from Persia. In the early days of the Church, Christians in Mesopotamia started dyeing Easter eggs red in memory of the blood shed by Christ during his crucifixion. The trend caught on and we still do it today, although thankfully we’re more colorful and celebratory than those morbid early Mesopotamian Christians.
Why a rabbit?
The rabbit is another Easter staple some think came from paganism. Rabbits are legendarily fecund, so pagans, it’s thought, associated the hare and its fecundity with spring and rebirth. (Pagan symbolism—at least as described by early historians—seems basic as hell.)
How the character “the Easter Bunny,” a sentient rabbit that delivers baskets of painted eggs to children, came to exist is a little murky, but the first written evidence of “The Easter Hare” dates back to Germany in the 1600s. Pennsylvania Dutch settlers brought the tradition to the United States in the 18th Century and it stuck around.
I don’t fully trust the Easter Bunny. He/she/they/it is a universally recognized holiday celebrity, but its background isn’t very well understood. We know everything about Santa—where he lives, who he hangs out with, that his belly looks like a bowl full of jelly when he laughs—but what do we really know about the Easter Bunny? Where does it live? Is it Catholic? Where would a rabbit even get all those eggs?
The lyrics to the one well-known song about the Easter Bunny, “Here Comes Peter Cotton Tail,” shed little light on its subject, other than these lines about the Easter Bunny’s motivation: “Maybe if you’re extra good, he’ll roll lots of Easter eggs your way.” Not only is that just a Santa rip-off, the word “maybe” is troubling. Shit or get off the pot, Easter Bunny.
A brief history of PAAS
The PAAS Dye Company is owned by Signature Brands, LLC but it has been around since the early 1900s, when William Townley, a drug store owner from Newark, New Jersey, invented colorful, dissolves-in-water-and-vinegar dye pellets for staining eggs. Despite the fact that you can just mix food coloring with vinegar and water to dye eggs and get better results for about a tenth of the price, PAAS sells around 10 million of its Easter egg decorating kits every year.
According to hard-hitting Easter research commissioned by the PAAS company, of the 49 percent of Americans who decorate eggs for Easter, 56 percent are interested in “making family memories” while 54 percent are “looking for a fun family activity,” and 53 percent want “quality family time.” Surprisingly, “I’m doing all this Easter shit because I feel like I have to or I’ll be a bad father” did not make the list.
