Easter is a great part of spring, where a lot of stores are filled with color, flowers, plastic eggs, and chocolate bunnies. For a lot of people there’s a lot of excitement for this time of year, especially because of seasonal candy.
But Easter is also a time Christians around the world remember Jesus’ crucifixion and celebrate his resurrection three days later. So why are there so many weird traditions that don’t seem connected to the Christian traditions? Here’s the reason behind the 5 Easter traditions that we found interesting.
Dyeing Easter Eggs
The tradition of decorating eggs of all kinds can be traced back to ancient pagans, mostly because eggs were associated with many different springtime rites, sometimes representing rebirth and life.
As a celebration of the new season, people in ancient cultures used to color eggs and gave them to friends and family as gifts. Later, Christians incorporated this tradition into their celebrations. According to some legends, Mary Magdalene could be responsible for the annual tradition of painting eggs.
One version tells that Mary Magdalene carried a basket of cooked eggs to share with the other women who would be mourning at Jesus’ tomb three days after his crucifixion. When she arrived to find the stone rolled away from the entrance and the tomb empty, the eggs in her basket turned a brilliant shade of red.
Another legend tells of Mary Magdalene going to speak to the Roman Emperor Tiberius after Jesus rose from the dead. She greeted the emperor by saying “Christ is risen” and holding out an egg (other versions say that the egg was on his table). Tiberius replied, “Christ has no more risen than that egg is red,” as soon as he said this the egg turned red.
In some Eastern European legends, the credit goes to Mary, Jesus’ mother, as the source of the egg-dying tradition.
Mary was present at her son’s crucifixion on Good Friday and, according to the legends, she brought eggs with her. In one version, blood from Jesus’ wounds drops on the eggs, coloring them red, while another version tells of Mary weeping, begging the soldiers at the cross to be less cruel to her son; she gives these soldiers eggs and, as her tears fall on them, they are spotted with brilliant color.
The Easter Bunny
From an outsider’s perspective, the idea of a giant rabbit as a symbol for easter seems very weird. Nevertheless, and according to Time Magazine, there’s a theory that the rabbit comes from pagan tradition, specifically the festival of Eostre, a goddess of fertility whose animal symbol was a bunny.
According to Bede, a prolific 8th-century English monk, the Anglo-Saxon month Eosturmonath (broadly the Easter season) “was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honor feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honored name of the old observance.” Whether Eostre was real or an invention by Bede has long been controversial, but scholarship on the goddess didn’t really pick up for over a thousand years.
In his 1835 book Deutsche Mythologie, Jacob Grimm (of the Brothers Grimm) speculated that Eostre was connected to a German goddess named Ostara (whose existence, again, is controversial). Almost 40 years later, Adolf Holtzmann wrote that “The Easter Hare is unintelligible to me, but probably the hare was the sacred animal of Ostara,” and a contemporary named K. A. Oberle hypothesized that “the hare which lay the parti-colored Easter eggs was sacred to [Ostara].”
Over the years, other writers repeated these speculations as fact, and the idea that a hare was one of Eostre’s sacred animals spread. Although hares and rabbits are different species, they’re often conflated because the animals look alike and are both associated with fertility.
Nevertheless, bunnies aren’t the animal traditionally associated with Easter in every country. Some identify the holiday with other types of animals like foxes or cuckoo birds.
Hollow Chocolate Bunnies
Knowing that Easter is associated with rabbits, and why, it starts to make sense why there are so many chocolate bunnies this time of year, but why are so many of them hollow inside?
As it turns out, it’s not just to get kids used to disappointment at a young age. According to the R.M. Palmer Company, one of the oldest makers of chocolate bunnies in the U.S., the empty insides are really just in consideration of your teeth. “If you had a larger-size bunny and it was solid chocolate, it would be like a brick; you’d be breaking teeth,” Mark Schlott, executive vice-president of operations, told Smithsonian Magazine in 2010.
Of course, there’s also the “wow” factor—confectioners can make a larger, more impressive-looking bunny for a reasonable price if there’s nothing inside it.
Hot Cross Buns
Like the bunny and the eggs, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when people started making hot cross buns—sweet rolls studded with raisins or currants and marked with a cross on top—during the week leading up to Easter Sunday. It’s said the tradition started in the 12th century with a monk who was inspired to mark his rolls to celebrate Good Friday.
The first written record we have of them dates back to an issue of Poor Robin’s Almanac from the 1730s: “Good Friday comes this Month, the old woman runs, With one or two a Penny, hot cross Bunns [sic].”
Osterbrunnen
The German tradition of Osterbrunnen—decorating public wells and fountains with elaborate greenery and Easter egg décor—only began about a century ago. It’s said that German villagers wanted to honor both Easter and the gift of water, which also represents life and renewal. Neighboring villages began to compete to see which of them could create the most fanciful fountains, and by 1980, approximately 200 villages were participating in the event. It’s even spread stateside—the town of Frankenmuth, a Bavarian-style village in Michigan, has adopted the Osterbrunnen tradition in the month surrounding Easter.
